Bell Canada hack causes release of 2 million email addresses

Bell Canada says its customer subscriber database has been hacked, with the exposure of almost 2 million email addresses, 1,700 customer names and/or telephone numbers. “There is no indication that any financial, password or other sensitive personal information was accessed,” the company said in a news release. “This incident is not connected to the recent global WannaCry malware attacks.” Bell says it took immediate steps to secure affected systems. It has been working closely with the RCMP cyber crime unit in its investigation and has informed the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. Bell guesses that the thieves will immediately run the email addresses against known databases of stolen passwords from other sites to see if there are any commonly used words, to try and crack the Bell email passwords. They will also run them against popular — and unsafe passwords such as “Password1,” “Password2,” “Monday1” etc., as well as dictionaries. It is not unusual for people to use the same password on different sites. Howard Solomon — IT World Canada