Lia Timson reports:
More than 28,000 Melbourne IT customers have had their details emailed to others in an embarrassing privacy breach by the domain registrar.
Each year the registrar is obliged by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to send a reminder to customers to ensure it keeps registrant information up to date for each registered domain.
It began sending the notifications to 350,000 customers in batches on Thursday, before it realised one of the batches had been emailed to customers other than the relevant domain owners or their representatives.
[…]
Smith said in total 10,130 customers were sent 28,310 emails in error.
“The information sent was mostly public information apart from one piece, the customer’s account username. No passwords were sent, and access to an account can only be gained with both the username and password,” he said.
Read more on Sydney Morning Herald.
Of course, given how many people re-use passwords and how many people’s passwords have been acquired and dumped this year, there still appears to be a security risk, but the bigger risk here may be that people who try to protect their identity or ownership of a domain may have been outed by the error.