Yesterday, October 7, 2019, Russian media reported that one of the largest Internet service providers (ISPs), Beeline , has faced a major security issue . The data of 8.7 million customers is available for sale online.
Some of the information that has been leaked is customers' full names, addresses, and mobile and landline phone numbers.
Russian telecommunications company Beeline has millions of customers in Russia, Asia and Australia.
The company itself reported the breach to Russian news agency Kommersant. According to Beeline, the breach took place in 2017.At that time, the company had discovered the incident, conducted an investigation, and identified the perpetrators. However, it had not made anything public.
Beeline said the breach only affected data from Russian customers, specifically those who had signed up for home broadband connections before November 2016.
Additionally, the company said that most of the users affected are no longer customers of the company.
As we said above, the data belonged to Russian customers. Customers in Australia, Kazakhstan, New Zealand, Armenia, and other countries were not affected.
Beeline has more than 50 million subscribers in Russia. However, the vast majority are mobile subscribers.
The Kommersant news agency learned about the breach from a source in the banking security sector. Despite the fact that the attack took place in 2017, the data has now been found online. It can even be found through Telegram channels.
According to Kommersant, Beeline is not the only Russian company to have suffered a data breach. Recently, Sberbank, one of Russia's largest financial institutions, faced the same problem after discovering that hackers were advertising a database containing credit card details of its customers on dark web forums.
