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Financial details of 1,200 Airtricity customers posted on firm’s website
Sunday, February 01, 2009 By John Burke
The personal and financial details of almost 1,200 customers of green energy firm Airtricity were posted on the company’s website for six weeks, The Sunday Business Post has learned.

The Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, has launched an investigation into the incident, which occurred in late November but was only accidentally spotted on January 9.As a result of the breach, the company has said that it will indemnify the 1,160 affected corporate and residential customers with full fraud protection insurance up to December 2010.

The material was accessible to anyone who accessed the company website and could have been read or downloaded by clicking a link on the company’s homepage. Forensic computer analysts have been unable to tell if the data was downloaded or copied.

The data included information given by customers who signed up online to Airtricity, including detailed direct debit data and personal household details. Hawkes’s office was informed of the breach on January 15 and a spokesman said that the firm was co-operating with its probe.

Peter Lord, a spokesman for Airtricity, said that the breach was discovered when a technician working on the website noticed that a file relating to online sign-ups was ‘‘placed in an unsecure location’’.

‘‘As soon as this risk was discovered, we took immediate action and closed the website and the offending file, and removed any externally-available information. The data protection authorities were notified and we followed their guidance on this matter,” he said.

‘‘We have carried out a number of tests, as a result of which we have no reason to believe that customers’ details have been accessed by an unauthorised party.

‘‘However, we are not in a position to be absolute on this point and therefore have offered customers the equivalent of fraud protection cover to give them additional peace of mind,” Lord said.

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