Bill Ray reports:
Updated Greystone Telecom, adopted child of TalkTalk and provider of telecommunications to the business community, is unwittingly sharing customer and contract details with the world: but TalkTalk doesn’t care.
The details include customer and contract prices, copies of sales orders and spreadsheets showing how things are going at the subsidiary which TalkTalk acquired last November.
The mistake is a classic: Microsoft’s IIS – the server that comes with Windows – is configured by default for anonymous access, and happily allows itself to be indexed (and cached) by the ever-helpful Google crawlers. In this case, the documents now readily to be found on teh interwebs (and flagged up to us by an alert Reg reader) include all kinds of handy information regarding Greystone customers and what deals they’ve struck with the TalkTalk tentacle.
The offending Windows box isn’t on TalkTalk’s own network – it’s hosted on the Demon Internet subnet.
“It’s not one of our servers, so it’s not our problem,” a TalkTalk rep told us. “Our firewalls are all secure.”
Read more on The Register.
Update: After posting the above, DataBreaches.net was contacted by TalkTalk, who claims that any allegations that they do not care are “totally inaccurate and very misleading.” The spokesperson writes:
We take data protection very seriously and have launched an investigation. We have established that the data did not come from any of our servers or any of our contactors’ servers, and that our firewalls and security procedures are functioning properly.
We are working to identify the IP address from which this data was disseminated, and are in contact with the appropriate authorities.