Personal details of 37,000 Eir customers exposed after the theft of a laptop

Personal details of 37,000 Eir customers exposed after the theft of a laptop, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and account numbers.

Eir, the fixed, mobile and broadband telecommunications company of Ireland, has suffered a data breach this week.

Personal details of 37,000 Eir customers have been exposed according to the telecommunications company.

The root cause of the data leak is the theft offsite of an unencrypted laptop containing the customers’ data. Exposed records include names, email addresses, phone numbers and Eir account numbers.

“eir has reported a data breach of personal details for up to 37,000 customers to the Data Protection Commissioner. The data consists of names, email addresses, phone numbers and eir account numbers.” states the data breach notification published by the company on its official website.

“This is a result of the theft of one laptop, which was stolen off premises. No other personal or financial data relating to customers was stored on the laptop in question.”

According to the company, no financial data was exposed.

The telco company reported the incident to the Data Protection Commissioner and to gardaí, the good news for the customers is that the stolen information has been used by a third party in a targeted attack.

“Eir treats privacy and protection of all data extremely seriously and our policy is that all company laptops should be encrypted as well as a password protected,” it said.

“In this case the laptop had been decrypted by a faulty security update the previous working day, which had affected a subset of our laptops and was subsequently resolved.”

Eir is notifying the incident to the affected customers.

For further questions customers can refer to the company FAQs.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Securi ty Affairs – data breach, Eir)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.