14 DAY TRIAL // On Wednesday, Virgin Media advised customers not to respond to an email sent by one of the company’s suppliers because they would actually be sending their replies to all others who have received the same email.
Graham Cluley has the details on what happened. It turns out that Virgin Media wanted to inform customers on some changes to the way they logged in to Google service with their virgin.net email address.
However, because an improperly configured mailing list was used, if users responded to the emails by pressing the “reply all” button, their messages were sent to everyone in the mailing list.
Some of those who received the replies also responded. Customers ended up with hundreds of spam emails in their inboxes. While they kept responding to the messages, and implicitly spamming each other, users were also exposing their email addresses.
“A small proportion of our customers have received an email from one of our suppliers which, if they reply-all, it is sent to a wider group. We’re investigating exactly what has happened and, in the meantime, advise people not to respond to this email. We apologise for the inconvenience caused,” Virgin Media representatives stated.
“Please note, this only impacts those customers currently using a virgin.net email address,” they added.
While Virgin says that only a small portion of customers are impacted, The Daily Mail says that there could be as many as 130,000 email addresses involved in the incident.
Many of the telecoms company’s customers are unhappy with the way the situation has been handled. Some believe that the company should have contacted them.
“I hope the Data Commissioner looks into this very seriously,” said one unhappy customer, cited by The Daily Mail.
“Even though it doesn’t appear as anyone abused the screwup maliciously, it clearly was a nuisance for people on the list as they would have received hundreds of messages in their inbox, effectively drowning out their legitimate mail,” Graham Cluley noted in a blog post.
“If you run a mailing list, please be very careful with how you set it up. Otherwise, you might find yourself like Virgin Media – having to say sorry, over and over again,” the expert advised.
The ICO is known to fine organizations responsible for mailing errors, but the incidents usually involve sensitive information. In this case, only a small number of email addresses have been exposed.
Update. The ICO is investigating the incident.