Dud KYC the massive liability in Optus hack

Australia’s leading privacy and cybersecurity experts have questioned why corporates and government agencies are continuing to hoard vast troves of sensitive personal information, following a major data breach at Optus.

‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) obligations that force public and private organisations to harvest reams of sensitive personal identifiers have resurfaced as a burning issue following the hack of and massive data theft from Australia’s second-biggest telecommunications carrier.

The questions surrounding last century’s KYC rules, creating data honeypots for both state-sponsored and criminal hackers, follow decades of grudging regulatory acceptance by industry and government and high-profile prosecutions of banks for KYC compliance failures.