14 DAY TRIAL // The largest Australian telecommunications provider Telstra exposed the personal details of 570 customers after an employee accidentally sent an email with the confidential data to the wrong mailing list.
The person responsible for the leak works for Telstra Country Wide, a Telstra division providing Internet and mobile services to regional and rural communities.
He was apparently working on updating some of the company’s dealers with information about orders.
A spreadsheet attached to the communication contained customer names, as well as their general location and email addresses.
However, instead of sending the message to the store owners maling list, the employee sent it to the one used to communicate with customers.
The company did not contact the affected individuals, but it did issue an apology when contacted by the Sydney Morning Herald about the incident.
"It is an oversight and we apologise to those affected," a Telstra spokesperson told the newspaper.
The incident comes after at the end of October, the company went through a data leak incident which involved misdelivering up to 220,000 letters containing people’s names, landline telephone numbers and price plans.
The company was trying to alert customers about upcoming changes in pricing, but some of them ended up receiving multiple emails or the wrong one.
The cases of employees exposing confidential information are not uncommon. In November we reported that Seton Hall University inadvertently emailed the personal and educational details of 1,500 seniors to 400 other students.
Back in September 2009, a Rocky Mountain Bank employee accidentally sent a document containing the details of 1,325 account owners to the wrong email address.
The bank then obtained a court order that forced Google to suspend the Gmail account of the innocent user who was at the receiving end of the message.
That same month, a customer service director from a long-standing British ISP called Demon Internet, mass-emailed the personal and login details of 3,600 subscribers.