Bell (2017 breach) data breach: 2.2M accounts exposed
Severity: high · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2017-05-16
In May 2017, the Bell telecommunications company in Canada suffered a data breach resulting in the exposure of millions of customer records. The data was consequently leaked online with a message from the attacker stating that they were "releasing a significant portion of Bell.ca's data due to the fact that they have failed to cooperate with us" and included a threat to leak more. The impacted data included over 2 million unique email addresses and 153k survey results dating back to 2011 and 2012. There were also 162 Bell employee records with more comprehensive personal data including names, phone numbers and plain text "passcodes". Bell suffered another breach in 2014 which exposed 40k records. Exposed data: email addresses, geographic locations, ip addresses, job titles, names, passwords, phone numbers, spoken languages, survey results, usernames. The breach dates from May 15, 2017; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on May 16, 2017.
What to do
- If you had a Bell (2017 breach) account, change its password and the password of any other account that reused it.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
- Check whether your addresses are in this breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com.
- Expect targeted phishing that quotes the leaked details; verify any unexpected contact out of band.
Sources
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