Virgin Media expose private email addresses

Yesterday, Virgin Media sent an email to all their virgin.net email customers concerning the use of this address type to log-in to any Google services including YouTube, Chrome and Maps. Very laudable. Unfortunately for all of us who have a virgin.net account, the way the contact email address was formulated has meant that all these email addresses have been exposed, so this morning when I signed into my email, I found some 320 emails from people I didn’t know. Some were where they had replied or replied all with their complaint about the emails in their email box. Others were where individuals had cottoned on what had happened and were using it to advertise their services or just for the fun of clogging up people’s email boxes.

While I was trawling through my spam emails I noted one which said they had reported the problem to quote: “I have contacted them and they don’t seem to be overly aware of the serious nature of this problem. But hey, apparently it will be fixed within 24/48 hours. Like that helps?!!“

There have also been a number of email saying that they were reporting the matter to the ICO.

This does have serious implications for Virgin Media in my view as I can’t see that any of these virgin.net email addresses are viable in the future.

Good luck to all of you who were affected. I would certainly recommend that you not only report the matter to Virigin Media through their normal concerns and issues channel but also register a complaint with the ICO.