Update: Bell Canada did not respond to the email they received from DataBreaches.net, but reportedly did send a statement last night to Canada.com, saying “Bell IT and security teams are investigating the situation and will provide further update tomorrow.”
NullCrew is back, and claims to have hacked Bell Canada.
In a tweet on January 15, they hinted at what was to come: “Successful day hacking internet service providers is successful.” and later: “Just had a talk with @Bell_Support, this is going to be fun.”
Today, they announced the data dump. The data have since been removed, but a copy is archived elsewhere on the Internet. DataBreaches.net is not linking to it, but has obtained a copy.
Lee Johnstone of CyberWarNews.info analyzed the 3.5MB data dump. His site is not currently available, but he kindly gave permission to quote his article at length:
the leak contains client login information with Email addresses, user ID’s, encrypted passwords as well as some other clients partial credit card information.
break down of the data:
- 12,708 User credentials with mixed user names/email addresses and passwords
- 28,602 user names and passwords which user names are partially mixed with users email addresses.
- 1,511 fax account users credentials with email addresses, user names, passwords and other related information.
- 1,531 credentials from a mitigation database
- There is also modem passwords, service plan credentials with user name and passwords as well a total of 127 partial credit card details.
it appears up until now bell has stay clear of big breaches and leaks like this specially ones that have been done by a simple SQL injection to a failed system that contains customer credentials like this.
Elsewhere, https://haveibeenpwned.com reported:
In February 2014, Bell Canada suffered a data breach via the hacker collective known as NullCrew. The breach included data from multiple locations within Bell and exposed email addresses, usernames, user preferences and a number of unencrypted passwords and credit card data from 40,000.
haveibeenpwned.com has now added 20,902 email addresses to its database so you can check to see if your data were compromised.
Bell Canada has not issued any statement either confirming or denying the claimed breach as of the time of this posting.
I’ve been informed by a regular reader that the fact that unencrypted passwords were leaked means that people could steal bandwidth from Bell that would get charged to the users’ accounts, as Bell reportedly charges per gig and the passwords are used for Internet connection.