Optus hacker withdraws extortion after increased law enforcement scrutiny

Increased law enforcement scrutiny on the widespread data breach at Australia's second-largest mobile carrier Optus has prompted the alleged hacker dubbed 'optusdata' to withdraw the demanded ransom for the incident, which has impacted 11 million customers, according to BleepingComputer. Stolen Optus data will not be sold or leaked and has already been deleted, claimed optusdata, who also apologized to Optus and 10,200 individuals who had their names, birthdates, phone numbers, physical and email addresses, passport numbers, and driver's licenses exposed as a result of the breach. "Too many eyes. We will not sale data to anyone. We can't if we even want to: personally deleted data from drive (only copy)," said optusdata. While optusdata has not been confirmed to be behind the Optus hack, such actions may have been in response to the Australian Federal Police's "Operation Hurricane" aimed at determining Optus attackers. "We are aware of reports of stolen data being sold on the dark web and that is why the AFP is monitoring the dark web using a range of specialist capabilities," said the AFP.