Switzerland’s biggest telecom operator, Swisscom joined the list of elite names in the world of business that has discovered the breach long time after the incident. The company claims intruders accessed the data through their sales partner last Autumn that resulted in a compromise of personal data of some 800,000 customers.
The telecom major discovered the incident during a routine check of operational activities and made it the subject of an in-depth internal investigation but stressed the systems were not hacked and no sensitive data, such as passwords, conversation or payment data, was affected by the incident. Rigorous long-established security mechanisms are already in place in this case.
In a statement, Swisscom said that it has blocked the access of relevant partner company immediately and have also made a number of changes to better protect access to such non-sensitive personal data by third-party companies including tighter controls for its partner companies and any unusual activity will automatically trigger an alarm and block their access. It also claimed that in future, it will no longer be possible to run high-volume queries for all customer information in the systems. And, in addition, two-factor authentication will be introduced this year for all data access required by sales partners.