Are 10,000 BEL Customers Exposed to Further Risks Following Data Leak?
On Tuesday, the Belize Electricity Limited held a press conference to provide details on the company’s recent encounter with hackers and the large quantity of data leaked from its information technology system. At the end of June, B.E.L. representatives received an email from a random, unknown address with information that the company’s network has a serious vulnerability and that company data would be published if the email was not responded to. Based on advice from its cyber security consultants, B.E.L. did not respond to those emails. On June thirteenth, evidence was provided through the C.E.O. in the Ministry of Public Utilities, that a large quantity of the company’s stored data had been published on the dark web. In the interview on Tuesday, the company explained that the leak did not include sensitive information such as banking and credit card data. But, are those ten thousand customers whose data were published on the dark web exposed to further attacks? Here is what one reporter asked.
Reporter
“Since, as the C.E.O. said, you don’t store that type of sensitive information like credit card numbers, there is no customers, or shareholders, employees, they don’t have to fear that somebody will be using their information for whatever purposes, identity theft, anything like that?”
Sean Fuller
Sean Fuller, General Manager, Finance & Business Support, B.E.L.
“There is always a risk of the use of your personal information for unscrupulous activities. So, there is no assurance that you may not have some actors out here who would want to take advantage of your personal information being exposed out there. But I can tell you from the credit card and personal banking information, all the transactions currently being handled between a customer and BEL as it relates to payments through the banking system or credit card payments through the banking system utilizes banking software, not BEL specific software to handle software. So, we have zero records of customer credit card information or banking information.”
