Slashdot Mirror
Telstra Denies Selling BigPond Customers' Data
Red Wolf writes "The Age reports that allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco. Melbourne-based IT worker Mark Edwards had doubts in this direction when he began receiving unusually large amounts of spam at his bigpond email address. Edwards grew suspicious because some of the spam being issued to him was also addressed only to a number of users within the bigpond.com domain, indicating that the unsolicited mass emailings were being sent to lists of BigPond users."
I'm with testra, and have had nothing but problems. Their Privacy policy allows selling your email address to advertisers. They've also got this insane capping system, that's stopped the rollout of broadband in AU.
Read more in Whirlpool. They've got the facts.
I'm not Seth.
They got hacked and don't want to admit it. Instead they play dumb when their users are getting spammed.
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
Just because the company doesn't sell the list doesn't mean that no-one within the company does (or someone that used to work there). I know of a few people that have taken lists of thousands of email addresses from their work on their last day, just in case they wanted to sell it.
On top of that, I know I've been offered cash more than once to get a list of the addresses in our database. If you were working in a call centre, in a country that you're just visiting, knowing that you'll only be there for a month or two, and knowing you'll never go back, wouldn't it just be too tempting to nap that list for future reference?
The only way to find out for sure if an ISP sells subscriber addresses is to make a long, hard to guess address (such as jon4859493@bigpond.com) and give it to no one, just let it sit there. If you receive spam, it's a pretty good indication that your ISP is being rather loose with your contact info.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
The Australian government recently (a day ago) announced that they will be privatising the rest (remaining 51%) of telstra. I wonder if this being on slashdot has anything to do with that?
Anyway, a day before the government's annoucement the senate was going to vote for an enquiry into broadband access in Australia.
Then later on the same day (or the next day) 4 independent senators voted against it (damn bastards, technophobics afraid of technology).
Look at these are two days in Australian politics and think, are Australians governed by morons?
Broadband enquiry likely
Broadband inquiry killed
New attempt at broadband enquiry
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Quite a lot of ISPs now re-sell Comindico's ADSL now.
Their entry into the market caused a small price war with wholesale prices, leading to the number of cheaper ADSL ISP options lately.
For those not familiar.
Telstra has a habit of raising their wholesale price to be close to or in some cases higher than their retail prices to end users, after a short delay the ACCC steps in and slaps down Telstra, who then behave for a while, then repeat.
This has the effect of discouraging competition.
So far the ACCC has not given out much more then slaps on the wrist, but this is mainly because the government is trying to sell off their share of Telstra, so they want the share price to be high.
You'll note that ACCC has been showing more teeth, and Telstra has been quiet lately, because the government has sidelined their plans to sell their shares (mainly because Telstra's share price is quite low atm).
%host -t mx bigpond.com
/ index/
bigpond.com mail is handled (pri=10) by extmail.bigpond.com
so you run your dictionary attack against the server
%telnet extmail.bigpond.com 25
Trying 144.135.24.8...
Connected to extmail.bigpond.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 bigpond.com service ready (identifier 29/4290323)
helo numpty
250 bigpond.com
MAIL FROM: <>
250 ok
RCPT TO: <aardvark@bigpond.com>
550 recipient <aardvark@bigpond.com> unknown
RCPT TO: <apple@bigpond.com>
550 recipient <apple@bigpond.com> unknown
RCPT TO: <mr_brianpowell@bigpond.com>
250 ok
and every 250 is a valid paid up customer
and there's not a long entry in the world that's going to find you
in fact you can visit http://www.bigpond.com/home/memservices/community
to harvest email addresses like I just did while waiting to post with EXTRANS
still it's more newsworthy if you CHARGE someone for this information !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
maybee an employee sold them to a spammer.
I have always wondered about inside jobs of this sort.
im sure it wouldnt be hard these days with the compact USB hard disks you can put on your keys.
simply plug it in, transfer all the email addresses, zip it up and send it to your favorite spammer, then collect.
sound easy? yeah... its scary.
When I got my phone connected here, Telstra mis-spelled my name. My name is incredibly uncommon.
... mis-spelled just as Telstra had ( at my company dot com dot au ).
:
About a month later, I was looking through the logs on the mail server at work ( as you do ) and saw an error about an unknown user, which just happened to be made up of my first initial, and then my last name
I immeditately called Telstra and confronted them, and they denied everything. The girl was quite rude about it and implied that I might also have stories about little green men carrying experiments out on my while I was asleep.
I absolutely INSIST that Telstra sold my details, consisting of ( but not limited to )
- my first and last name
- my employer
The above I can deduce from the logs on the mail server at work.