National cabinet meets to debate end of mandatory COVID-19 isolation; Companies face data cull after Optus hack; Queen’s

With millions of identity documents exposed in Optus’ data breach, many Australians now need to replace their cards and passports to make sure they can’t be used by criminals for fraud and theft.

And with the Prime Minister confirming on Friday that Optus, and not taxpayers, would foot the bill for at least the new passports, just how big a bill could Optus end up with to clean up the mess?

Estimating these numbers requires a healthy dose of assumptions and guesswork, given the lack of solid details on what data was stolen. It’s believed up to 9.8 million Australians had their personal data compromised in the breach, but only 3 million or so had identity documents like passports or drivers licences exposed, and 37,000 Medicare numbers.

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It’s impossible to tell at this point how many individual documents Optus would have to pay to replace, especially given some people would have only had a passport or a licence exposed and not both, and some of the data will likely be out of date. But let’s assume an extreme outcome where the telco had to pay to replace 3 million passports, 3 million drivers licences and 15,000 Medicare cards (22,000 of the exposed numbers were expired).

Licences are easy to calculate, as they cost an average of around $27 to replace depending on your state, assuming it wouldn’t cost extra to change the numbers and assuming Optus couldn’t arrange some kind of bulk discount, the final price tag lands at $81 million.

Passports are a bit trickier. They usually cost $193 to replace, but can be free in certain situations, so it’s unclear what the actual cost of replacement would be in this scenario. So at maximum that’s $580 million, but in all likelihood it would be much lower after Optus works the issue out with the relevant department, and you subtract the customers whose passport information was not included or was out of date.

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