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Grabby baddie scours Paddy Power's towers: 650k punters leaked and it took 4 years to admit it

We're still a safe bet, say bookies

Irish bookmakers Paddy Power has admitted miscreants copied from its systems more than 649,000 customer records containing personal information.

The snaffled dataset contained names, usernames, addresses, email addresses, phone contact numbers, date of birth, and security question and answer pairs. The leaked data comes from accounts opened before 2010.

It seems the bookmaker knew about the breach four years ago, as that was when it fixed the vulnerability that allowed the digital break-in to occur, but is only just disclosing it now after realizing how much information was pilfered from its database.

In a statement, Paddy Power said "no financial information or customer passwords were compromised in the isolated incident and customers’ accounts are not at risk as a result."

"The full extent of the 2010 data breach became known to the company in recent months when it took legal action in Canada with the assistance of the Ontario Provincial Police to retrieve the compromised dataset from an individual," it added.

Customers are advised to find other websites where they use the same prompted security question and answer, usually as a way to prove one's identity when reseting a password, and change to a different question.

There's no word on what to do about the leaked "address, email address, phone contact number and date of birth" information, just the sort of information needed to craft personalised phishing emails or to pull off ID theft.

Ireland's data privacy watchdogs expressed disappointment that they have only now learned of the breach, four years after it was tackled.

“We understand Paddy Power had identified the attack back in October 2010 and implemented security measures to stop the attack,” said the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner said a statement, supplied to Irish technology site Techcentral.ie.

“Following discussions, this Office is satisfied with the measures implemented by Paddy Power to prevent a repeat of this type of incident.

“However, this Office is disappointed that Paddy Power did not report the matter to us back in October 2010 in line with best practice.” ®

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