Australian Consumer Watchdog Exposed Users' Email Addresses

Friday, April 11, 2014

Australian Consumer Watchdog Exposed Users' Email Addresses

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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has apologised after the addresses of subscribers to some of the ACC's information services were published online.

According to ACCC, the affected websites are Recalls Australia, Product Safety Australia, SCAMwatch and the ACCC Public Registers website.

ACCC said that the leaked email addresses "were not indexed by search engines or linked from a web page on our sites," adding that they could only be found if specific URLs were tried.

The ACCC resolved this issue as it became aware of it to prevent further access to the email addresses. The ACCC is investigating how this issue occurred and is reporting this breach to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

It is not yet clear to the ACCC how many users have been affected or how long this has been an issue.