Ben Cubby reports:
Personal information of more than 130,000 Telstra customers has been exposed in the latest large-scale privacy breach to strike big Australian companies.
Telstra said a “misalignment of databases” rather than hacking was responsible for the breach, which saw customer details wrongly made available on the online White Pages and via directory assistance.
The company said sorry to its customers on a blog post, and said it was individually contacting those affected. The breach spanned a period of years.
Read more at The Age. Although the headline writer and reporter call it a data breach, it is more of a leak or unintended exposure due to error.
This is not Telstra’s first data security incident, of course. Over the years, DataBreaches has reported on Telstra’s data security and privacy lapses or issues about three dozen times. A search of this site for Telstra paints a concerning picture of Telstra’s data protection.