Getting more than you bargained for
Here’s an interesting story of how a New Zealand pizza chain had their database hacked. They lost some 230,000 households details; passwords, email and home addresses, phone numbers - oh and their pizza eating habits, of course.
It’s always good to have a laugh at the expense of those Kiwis. But it turns out the amount of digital data being lost worldwide is simply colossal. For those inclined, the DataLossDB Project tracks some of this and you can vist them here. But before we crow at the expense of Pizza companies consider this experience one of our own staff had in the weekend.
I recently visited a franchise store of a well know telco, to purchase a pre-paid SIM card for my iPad. On placing the card into my iPad I ran into an issue, not being able to connect to their network. On calling the helpdesk it was discovered the supposedly new card had already been activated a month earlier by someone else. I was instructed to return to the store to obtain a replacement card.
Whilst in the store the sales person took me over to a store terminal, which was running Windows XP, for him to log into my account. The purpose being to verify the issue I was having. As I stood beside him, he opened a browser, and without batting an eyelid, proceeded to click his way through two warning notices on his way to my account details, which were on some kind of central internet database. The first reminded him he hadn’t applied Windows updates and the second stated the Windows firewall was not activated.
Brilliant.
So when you hear in the news that a large Australian Telco has lost thousands of customer details from their internet database you won’t need to ask yourself how these things happen.
Comments
Carlton Duston
Something on our blog editor is changing the URL link to the NZ Herald, the correct URL is:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10661073
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