When Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin first learnt about suspicious activity on the telco’s IT networks, she had no idea of the extent of the attack. The crisis that followed made millions of Australians aware of the power of their data.
It began with a phone call from the other side of the world. Kelly Bayer Rosmarin was waiting at the airport after a run-of-the-mill business trip to the United States. Beside the Optus chief executive was her marquee hire, former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian. The pair were waiting to board a Qantas flight home. The call, however, meant it was a flight Bayer Rosmarin would never make.
“I immediately wanted to know when we were going to get some clarity on how big this was, and what had actually happened, and I was told, ‘Well it might take us a really long time’,” Bayer Rosmarin tellsin her first interview about the incident. She has warily agreed to speak, in the hope that those outside the company can understand the reality of dealing with a very modern business calamity.
The company was about to find itself the focus of one of the biggest and most influential news stories of the year. The under-appreciated threat of cyber villainy had suddenly become the biggest immediate challenge for corporate Australia – and for the new Labor government. “By the Friday, we had set up a sort of war room in one of our larger spaces downstairs, which at its peak had about 120 people working in it,” Williams recalls.
“We had detected the hacker and shut them down, and worked out that the biggest risk was phishing on our customers,” Bayer Rosmarin says. “I told each one of them to text me who in their organisation was their cyber head, and put them in touch with our CISO [chief information security officer], so they could get a bit of inside information as to what happened, and they could brace to protect customers as well,” Bayer Rosmarin says.
Mike Byrne, senior regional ANZ leader for Mandiant Consulting, was a first responder to the Optus cyberattack. some of its business customers’ emails. But in the Optus case, it was arriving after the attacker had been stopped. The long weekend and unexpected nature of the crisis meant many stressed execs and tech specialists were having unplanned “bring your kids to work” days. On top of everything else, staff had to beware of trip hazards as random toys accumulated in the corners.
All the obvious questions flew at the company, as the non-technology press discovered the concept of a corporate cyberattack seemingly for the first time. Berejiklian, one insider said, had an unerring ability to predict what the media would want to know, and how the story would be kept fresh with new “human interest” angles emerging as the days progressed.She was also using all her government connections to link Optus insiders with the relevant people in different government agencies. Finding the person responsible for decisions about re-issuing driver’s licences, for example, is not as straightforward as you might think.
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