How Was Optus Hacked?

The Government is being very quiet about the responsibilty for the OPTUS data hacking.

They kept the old landline rules when the mobile phone era began – you needed 100 points to get a land line, therefore you needed 100 points to get a mobile.

The difference was that landines were basically Government run (Telecom) and so they knew that simply sighting those documents was all that was necessary – and there wasn’t a space to record all the details on a database – cos there were none! It was all paper.

Then mobiles appeared and the old rules were applied (cos Government regulations) even though the mobile companies were NOT run by the Government.

So suddenly, with the advance in technology, the documents were being scanned and saved to a database no one had thought of as existing when the original rules were set. Once you have a big enough database it will always attract the criminal elements.

So the fault goes back to the Government!

Not any single Government. It was the Governmental Bureaucracy which was in charge of dealing with Government Acts, Legistlation and Regulations. The Public Service which also acted as the Memory of the Government.

Those Bureaucrats knew everything about how the system worked. They knew its strengths and weaknesses.

Then Governments began to dismantle the Public Service and there went the Bureaucratic memory.

The data being demanded and discarded became data which was keepable in databases at about the same time and consequential problems were not seen because those who would have known about them had been moved on to non-public service jobs.

So the fault was an unseen consequence of Malcolm Fraser’s cost-cutting which has continued to this day.

But it is easier for what remains of the Bureaucracy to blame Optus for the system failure in the biggest ‘Look over there’ exersize in some years!

Our elected representatives still haven’t a clue about the real causes because there is no Public Service Memory to tell them!