ISP Emails Customer Database To Thousands

Barence writes "British ISP Demon Internet has mistakenly sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of more than 3,600 customers with one of its new ebills. The spreadsheet contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system. It was attached to an email explaining how to use the new system. Police forces and NHS trusts are among the email addresses listed in the database. A spokesman for Demon Internet confirmed that the company "was aware this happened this morning"."

Comments

computer billing story

[innocent_white_lamb]

I run a movie theatre and send and receive a lot of freight (film cans and advertising materials) by bus. I have an account with the provincial bus company so they send me a bill once per month containing all of the waybills for that month.
 
This story goes back several years, as you will see.
 
Originally, I got a monthly bill that consisted of a strip of adding machine paper stapled to an invoice that totalled up my waybills for the month. Then the bus company decided to modernize and send out bills printed by computer, which were apparently aggregated by having a computer in each bus depot send in each days transactions by modem to a central computer that printed the monthly bills.
 
For the next year and a half, I got bills for anywhere from $10 to $30/month, nowhere near the $600-plus that I usually spent on bus freight.
 
18 months later I got a (manually generated) bill for $13,000.
 
The bus company has since stayed with manually generated bills and has never tried to computerize that part of their operation again.

Re:Free market will fix this

[Penguinisto]

Their biggest competitor is BT ... Not quite seeing a stampede happening in that direction.

There's always Orange, I guess...

(...and to think that I bitch about Comcast...)

/P