Bell Canada

Bell Canada, an Ottawa, Canada-based telecommunications company, announced on February 2, 2014 that their computer systems, which are managed and maintained by a third party were breached and that approximately 22,000 customer user names and passwords were stolen. In addition, the hackers got a hold of the credit card information for five small business customers based on what they found was posted online.

Bell provides service to more than 21MM customers across Canada so they were lucky that the scope of the breach was actually relatively small.

What’s interesting is that Bell Canada maintains a blog page on their website that discusses data breaches, how they happen, what can happen, and how to remedy the issue and further protect your personal data. This blog was posted five months before the actual breach occurred.