Freedom Mobile, the fourth largest mobile telecommunications network in Canada, has been the victim of a hacking attack. The attack resulted in the breach and leakage of the personal data of many customers.
The securitywho discovered the leak found 5 million accounts with customer data on an Elasticsearch server. The worrying thing is that anyone could have accessed the information, since the database was not password-protected.
It took the company about a week to take some protective measures, once the server vulnerabilities became known
The compromised customer data includes: names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and passwords for Freedom Mobile accounts. The database also included credit card numbers, expiration dates and verification codes and other information, stored in plain unencrypted text.
Freedom Mobile is a fairly popular company with about 1.5 million Canadian customers. According to the data so far, the data of about 15,000 customers has been affected.
Investigations showed that the data that was breached belonged to customers who had opened accounts or made some changes to their accounts between March 25 and April 16.
" investigation revealed that a very limited amount of Freedom Mobile customer data was compromised as a result of a misconfigured server, managed by Apptium, a new service with which Freedom Mobile partners," the company said.
A more thorough investigation into the case has now begun.
Researchers Ran Locar and Noam Rotem consider the Freedom Mobile data breach to be one of the largest in Canadian history. Another equally large attack occurred in 2017. The victim of the attack was Bell Canada. During the attack, hackers managed to steal approximately 1.9 million files.
A report regarding the Freedom Mobile data breach has already been sent to the Privacy Office of Canada, and a spokesperson said it will review the report and consider next steps.
