A Sydney man has been arrested for an alleged SMS scam stemming from information acquired in the Optus data breach.
AFP Assistant Commissioner Justine Gough will face the media on Thursday afternoon to provide details of the arrest.
Mobile phone and internet customers will be better protected from fraud under new regulations to be introduced after the breach.
Telcos will be able to better coordinate with financial institutions to fight potentially malicious activity if customers’ details are compromised under plans announced by the federal government on Thursday.
The proposed amendments would let the companies temporarily share key information such as driver’s licence, Medicare and passport numbers with financial service firms to let them better monitor and safeguard breaches.
The government said Optus would also be able to share identifiers with Commonwealth, state and territory agencies to try and prevent fraud following the data breach, which left millions of customers’ personal details exposed to hackers.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the move strengthened safeguards in the event of a similar breach.
“What this is all about is to try and reduce the impact of this data breach on Optus customers and to enable financial institutions to implement enhanced safeguards and monitoring,” she told reporters.
“We take people’s personal information and the protection of that very seriously.”
Ms Rowland said Optus had asked for greater data access to improve their monitoring of fraud.
“We examined this, did proper due diligence and we need to be clear, these regulations are specifically in response to these cyber threats and we know this is on a scale and scope that hasn’t happened in Australia before,” she said.
“We considered it prudent having taken and considered the proper legal advice that the most effective way to enable this data to be shared beyond doubt was through amending these regulations.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers said the amendments followed close industry consultation and would allow for safer and more secure data sharing.
“They’ve been carefully designed with strong privacy and security safeguards to ensure only limited information can be made available temporarily to prevent and respond to cyber security incidents, fraud, scams and related activities,” he told reporters.
“They give … (the) communications minister the ability to specifically add financial service entities if required, but only where those entities are related to or support an APRA-regulated entity.”
By Alex Mitchell in Canberra
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