The Sun has suffered further data breaches after the hacks by LulzSec/Anonymous ten days ago, but this time from an unrelated hacker. The details posted in various places online contain personal information such as home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses according to a story by ComputerWorld UK.
The Hacker, known as Batteye, also claims to have leaked lists of entrants to recent The Sun competitions, entries to the Miss Scotland Beauty, those who wanted to send a message to the Royal Couple on Wedding Day, and those who have claimed to have been bullied at school. It appears the hacker has found a poorly protected directory on The Sun’s servers that the newspaper uses for storage of spreadsheets. In a statement on Pastebin, Batteye states:
We will begin today be presenting to you, various files obtained from The Sun, a company within the News Corp group. We will continue, then, by exposing the world for what it is; a less than perfect place where we cannot trust those who we ask to protect our information. We will continue, until the list has been exhausted, or until the world and man kind realizes that we must change how we go on.
The leaking of this information comes as a further embarrassment to The Sun, and News International still reeling from #HackGate. That this lack of care with personally identifiable information may fall foul of the UK’s Data Protection Act will put The Sun’s legal team in a very awkward situation.