Swisscom, Switzerland’s market-leading telecommunications group, has pledged to tighten its security following a data breach that resulted in the personal information of around 800,000 customers being compromised.
Issuing a statement yesterday, the Bern-based telco said unknown parties “misappropriated” the access rights of a sales partner last year, gaining unauthorized access to customers’ name, address, telephone number, and date of birth.
Under Swiss data protection law, the data is classed as ‘non-sensitive’, as these details, for the most part, are in the public domain or available from list brokers.
This designation, however, is unlikely to impress the 800,000 customers – nearly 10% of the country’s population – who now face the prospect of targeted spam messages or nuisance calls from the unknown party.
Prompted by the incident, Swisscom said access by partner companies to its customer data will now be subject to tighter controls. Any unusual activity will automatically trigger an alarm and block access, the group stated.