Security Breaches are Wake-up Calls to Phone Companies

SECURITY BREACHES ARE WAKE-UP CALLS TO PHONE COMPANIES
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Marguerite Reardon]
Phone companies are once again feeling the heat as another scandal erupts highlighting how easily unauthorized individuals can access personal phone records. Last week, Hewlett-Packard acknowledged that it launched an investigation into a boardroom leak that resulted in the hiring of a private investigator to gather information on telephone calls made and received by board members and nine journalists, including News.com's Tom Krazit, Dawn Kawamoto and Stephen Shankland. The news has once again highlighted a growing problem plaguing the telecommunications industry called "pretexting," a scam where unauthorized individuals pretend to be someone they're not to obtain personal information. Private investigators and con artists have been using this technique for years not just to obtain phone records, but also to get access to bank records, credit card information and other sensitive information. "There's no doubt that the telecommunications industry has been extremely lax in authenticating customers," said Robert Douglas, an information security consultant and former private investigator with a company called PrivacyToday.com. "There's an institutional perception of 'What's the big deal. It's just phone records.' And that has to change."
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