Optus hasn’t received ransomware demands so far

Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin is speaking. Here is her opening statement:

“I’d like to start off by making sure that it’s clear that we are apologising to all our customers we know that this attack creates great concern and it’s something that we learned about on Wednesday that some of our customers’ information had been compromised and throughout we have used what’s best for customers approach to guide our response to this attack.

“That is why we wanted to put a call out to all of our customers to be on alert in the best way that we can, and we decided was by using you, the media. We know that in these situations time can be of the essence. So we contacted the media in less than 24 hours from when we learned that this incident had occurred.

“We were informing customers as quickly as we can in a very different way from what has been done with previous cyber attacks how we use those 24 hours to shut down the way that unauthorised access occurred, and apply what we learned across our whole system and check there weren’t other vulnerabilities.

“In addition, we have been working with Australian government cyber experts, privacy officials and regulators with proactively reached out to the major financial institutions, our competitors, and other businesses, so that we could protect not only our own customers as much as possible, but all Australians.

“We understand that customers will be concerned and while it’s not all our customers that have been impacted, openness and transparency is what we believe is best.”