week 12 Security and Privacy

Internet made our life easier and contains many entertainment service and information for us to use. However, because customers need to put their personal  information on Internet, there are more and more privacy and security breaches happened in Australia. Many companies have breached privacy and security, such as Vodafone, ANZ and Telstra, Sony. Companies are apologized to customer. However, it is not mandatory for companies in Australia  to advise the privacy breach to their customer. There are also no mandatory punishment for breaches in Australia, those will be very harmful for customer.

See if you can find an example of a privacy breach that was reported in the Australian or international news in the last 6 months. What were the consequences? i.e. legal, political, financial, personal etc. What action was taken in response to the privacy breach?
Telstra has had a major privacy breach of one of its customer databases, including 70,000 usernames and passwords for BigPond accounts on December 2011. It leaked user names, passwords and other personal information of its customers onto the open web. see http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/it-news/network-outage-as-telstra-probes-privacy-breach-20111210-1oohk.html

What were the consequences?What action was taken in response to the privacy customers were will angry about the inconvience before the services has been restored. they wrote some bad comments on Twitter. 

 What action was taken in response to the privacy breach?

Telstra apologized to its customer and disabled the BigPond service as it scrambles to contain a privacy breach that exposed customer details. Before the service being restored, up to one million BigPond users are not able to access their email and other online services, such as My Account. Telstra said it is resetting the passwords of around 60,000 customers as a precaution and they were hoping to restore the service afterwards. However, resetting a password involved a lengthy wait on the telephone.  As of Sunday evening, this was at least 45 minutes and so it appeared Telstra had not deployed any extra staff to handle the consequences of the breach.  Customers are being told they will be contacted within two to three days.