It seems both Fairfax and News Limited have red faces this week after both camps suffered embarrassment. It was good to see Fairfax publish its own embarrassment, but a quick look at News Limited sites saw no mention of their own embarrassment and possible litigation.
Firstly Fairfax forgot to pay an $83 bill to WebCentral, whose systems (or some over zealous account manager) switched off the Commercialrealestate.com.au (CRE) for a day! The CRE website was purchased last year for a millions of dollars (or so) and perhaps some bills were sent to the previous owner. Anyway, I give Fairfax credit for at least publishing its own story and taking it on the chin.
Now if everyone disconnected us on outstanding $80 bills I would have no power, broadband, telephone, mobile and no computer!
As for News Limited, I think their gaffe will have even more serious implications. It seems that their CareerOne website published the personal account records and internal notes about these accounts online and worse it seems that these details were online for over a month.
In one case, a client is referred to as a “retard” and in another a client is called a “lazy good for nothing”, which as we all know does not look to good, maybe it was referring to me?
As many of the big portals are now gearing towards holding sales and other client data on its servers, it serves as a warning to any company holding the personal information of clients. Internal websites or data stored locally is only stored locally if people outside of the network are denied access. Apparently a simple URL was all that was needed to access this data.
I just wonder how long it was before CareerOnes’ competitors actually knew about it and then reported it? Or did they know? It seems to have held some juicy details.
A quick look on News Ltd websites showed no articles on the CareerOne ‘security breach’ (can you call it that when all you have to do is type in a URL?), however rival news group showed no such restraint. Read the Fairfax release here.