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Monday, October 13, 2008

Deutsche Telekom Hit By Another Customer Data Privacy Breach - cellular-news.com - 12 Oct 2008

­A week after confirming­ that customer data for 17 million T-Mobile customers had been lost, Deutsche Telekom has been hit by another customer privacy problem after it was revealed that it was easy to access the details of 30 million landline customers.

The company had only just announced procedures to clamp down on loose data protection policies when Der Spiegel revealed the latest breach in preview copies of its weekly magazine due out on Monday.

The newspaper reported that Deutsche Telekom had not patched the new security holes it found until reporters confronted the company for comment. The company said that it has now closed the loophole - which had also included customer bank account details.

The company added that it had no indication that anyone had used the data maliciously, and has set up a Data Privacy Board department to oversee staff access to customer data.

"In the past few months, we have developed a comprehensive set of measures which we will now implement to immediately improve data privacy", said Timotheus Höttges, Board of Management member responsible for Sales and Service, as well as Security. He was speaking before the latest data breach was discovered.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The number of data breaches just keeps growing.

Anonymous said...

These data breaches and thefts are due to a lagging business culture. As CIO, I'm always looking for ways to help my team, business teams, and ad hoc measures of various vendors, contractors and interal team members. A book that is required reading (specific chapters, depending on nature of projects and teams) is "I.T. Wars: Managing the Business-Technology Weave in the New Millennium." It has a great chapter regarding security (among others).

We keep a few copies kicking around - it would be a bit much to expect outside agencies to purchase it on our say-so. But, particularly when entertaining bids for projects, we ask potential solutions partners to review relevant parts of the book, and it ensures that these agencies understand our values and practices.

The author, David Scott, has an interview here that is a great exposure: http://businessforum.com/DScott_02.html

The book came to us as a tip from one of our interns who attended a course at University of Wisconsin, where the book is in use; I like to pass along things that work, in the hope that good ideas continue to make their way to me. I hope you can make use of this info...