Telstra customers were left exposed after a 63-year-old man managed to access the personal details of 66,000 users – with a simple search.
Robert Irvine stumbled across the information when he logged into his Telstra account to fix his email he was having issues with.
Irvine searched the term ’email’ where he found 66,500 results that included names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and even employment information of Telstra customers.
The layman admitted his shock to 9news claiming he’s not ‘tech-savvy person.’
Robert Irvine (pictured), 63, was shocked to find that he could access the personal details of 66,000 Telstra customers
The first Telstra customer he found worked for the Department of Defence (pictured)
He said he checked the unbelieveable finding a couple of times to make sure he didn’t access the information by accident.
Irvine also tested that the easily accessible information was accurate by contacting his first result – a man employed by the Department of Defence.
‘I got through to his phone and I got his answering machine. So I didn’t speak to him but I checked that this was all real,’ he said.
Kimberley Cox, a victim of the privacy breach, said that she was in shock that Irvine could access her details.
‘I didn’t get contacted by [Telstra] at all or notified that this has happened. How does something like this even happen? Especially in today’s world where we have all these great privacy acts,’ she said.
Kimberley Cox (pictured) said she was shocked to find out that Irvine could access her details
Telstra are investigating the data breach and pulled down their site ‘Your Telstra Tools’ after they received alerts about the incident.
‘We will keep that site and access to that service down for all of our customers until we are fully satisfied that any and all issues have been resolved,’ said Michael Ackland, Telstra Head of Sales and Service.
Telstra admitted that two other people were able to access the details of customers but only 18 files were actually viewed.
The company apologised for the issues and said they were contacting the customers who had been impacted.
Telstra have pulled down the ‘Your Telstra Tools’ site while the data breach is investigated