BT has whistle blown as a foul up of email security unfolds.

Yesterday the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) began investigating BT’s data security email hackpractices after an apparent whistle-blower blew the lid on BT mistakenly exposing their user’s credentials en masse. According to the BBC, BT has stated that the ICO’s investigation is related to an issue “identified and fixed”.

 

Smoking gun?

However the ICO confirmed that as a result of certain evidence provided [whistle-blower], an investigation pointing towards an issue relating to a daily compromise of BT customer email accounts to scammers and spammers was under-way.

The ICO also confirmed they were considering other action with regards to BT as the telecoms giant was allowing insecure logging-in using HTTP rather than the safer, encrypted HTTPS protocol.

Passing the buck?

The whistle-blower’s identity and origin is still unknown but many believe that a former employee of a US company contracted to build BT’s new email system had some involvement. The new system being built is in preparation for receiving the switch over of several million BT customers email accounts from its existing Yahoo partnership.

BT

Interestingly, BT claimed that the potential unauthorised access of its customer email accounts were being confused with issues directly affecting Yahoo rather than BT itself.

The issue is still open and remains under investigation.

Are you a BT customer? Do you feel your email credentials could have been compromised? Please get in touch via Facebook or Twitter and let us know.



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