One of Aus's biggest telcos has been hacked - like totally - every personal detail of every customer, past & present, has been taken.

Optus: Information which may have been exposed includes customers’ names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, and, for a subset of customers, addresses, ID document numbers such as driver’s licence or passport numbers.

Great. That's everything. Scammers can/will use that info to prey on those people - especially the elderly.

Another example of a big corporate scraping all your data - then leaking it. Whoops, sorry. But at least we made record profits!

As usual, the data hack was conducted with total impunity. No word of who took it - no hope of ever tracking them down.

Luckily Optus gave some advice on what exposed customers should do:

Ms Rickard said there a number of things people can do to protect themselves if they are concerned their personal details may have been exposed.

Simple steps like enabling two-factor authentication on all banking and regularly checking your accounts to see if any unknown purchases have been made can help keep your details safe.

How does 'two-factor authentication' help? Hand over more data to be hacked? They've already got five factor identification anyway.

The other thing you can do to 'protect yourself' is keep checking you bank account to see if you've been robbed! We won't be able to stop that or anything, coz we lost all your data, but at least you will know how much you've had stolen.