Vodafone ‘hacked’ reporter’s mobile

O’Brien, an award-winning reporter for The Sun-Herald, broke a story in 2011 about a major security lapse which saw the details of millions of Vodafone customers, including their names, home addresses and credit card details, available online with widely used and shared generic passwords.

The investigation was carried out to find out if the privacy laws were broken by any employee rather than find out the source of the Fairfax story, she said. Glad they sorted that one out.

Vodafone claimed that only the employee was involved in the matter and the company is not liable to any kind of allegations associated with the phone hacking scandal.

The invasion of privacy is devastating. What was in those texts? What did they see?

It said it had referred the matter to the NSW police and AFP and raised them with the Australian Communications and Media Authority and Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

The company directed Guardian Australia to a subsequent statement on Tuesday, saying that it had apologised to O’Brien “in relation to the unacceptable and potentially criminal behaviour of a former employee”.

VHA was formed when Vodafone Australia and Hutchison Telecom merged their Australian operations after the firms concluded that holding third place in the local market was preferable to a bun-fight over the fourth spot.

“Over the past four years, VHA has invested heavily in the security of its IT systems”.

The use of the term “current VHA management” in the company’s statement appeared to be an attempt to distance Vodafone from previous executives’ handling of the situation. The company has very strict controls and processes around the privacy of customer information, and has appointed a dedicated privacy officer. The investigation found there was no evidence VHA management had instructed the employee to access the messages and that VHA staff were fully aware of their legal obligations in relation to customer information.

“If the issue relating to breaching the reporter’s privacy by searching her private call records and text messages gets into the public domain, this could have serious consequences given it is a breach of the Australian Telecommunications Act”, Mr Yates wrote in an email intended for Vodafone global corporate security director Richard Knowlton in 2012. So in other words nothing really happened so everyone can go back to bed thinking that Vodafone is a really nice company and its data is super secure.