Active email addresses of about 1.9 million customers of Bell Canada have been illegally secured by hackers, the company has revealed, while also stating that this attack has no link to “WannaCry” malware case. According to Bell Canada, the largest telecommunications company of Canada, nearly 1,700 names and phone numbers of customers were also stolen during the data breach.
“We apologize to Bell customers for this situation and are contacting those affected directly,” the company said in a statement.
“There is no indication that any financial, password or other sensitive personal information was accessed,” the company stressed.
Bell is the largest telecommunications company of Canada, and provides wireless, TV, Internet, home phone and business communications services to its customers.
According to Bell Canada, “an anonymous hacker” is behind this data breach and it is still unclear when and how the breach occurred. The company said it is working with RCMP to investigate the attack.
Bell said this attack has no link to the “WannaCry” malware infections that have affected over 200,000 systems in about 150 countries since Saturday.
Meanwhile, an online post appearing on internet claimed responsibility of this attack and said they (hackers) are “releasing a significant portion of Bell.ca’s data due to the fact that they have failed to cooperate with us.”
“This shows how Bell doesn’t care for its customers safety and they could have avoided this public announcement,” the post continues.
“Bell, if you don’t cooperate more will leak :)”
The post links to files having a large number of email addresses and related customer information, and this data looks similar to Bell’s description of the stolen data. These files also give phone numbers, job titles, locations, etc, of about 150 supposed Bell contractors and employees.
In 2014, hackers had attacked a Bell contractor and stole user names and passwords of about 22,421 customers. The RCMP had charged a Quebec youth in this case.
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