Swisscom on mobile chaos at Credit Suisse
At the beginning of January, 3,500 Swiss Credit Suisse bankers received unsolicited data. Instead of a personalized phone bill, Swisscom disclosed the calls and costs of colleagues on business cell phones. A security risk?
Thousands of Credit Suisse employees received unsolicited data from their colleagues. Instead of viewing their own call duration or cost management, they were able to view and save information about employees on their mobile phones: Who was on the phone with whom, how long those calls lasted, and certainly what the calls cost. CS did not want to comment on the incident either. A spokeswoman for the big bank referred to Swisscom.
Swisscom is once again in a bad light in this debacle. The mass data leak is said to have started via them, as a spokeswoman for the semi-public telephone company admitted on Friday when asked: "Today, around 3,500 employees of the Credit Suisse Group received an e-mail with a connection statement (including a cost breakdown) for Swisscom Mobile services," the official statement said. Unfortunately, a manual error was made by a Swisscom employee, the unofficial statement said.
According to the Swisscom spokeswoman, the consequences are severe: "We immediately sent an email to the affected persons to inform them about the incorrect documents and to formally apologise," she said. Swisscom would now make up for sending the correct documents "next Tuesday, 15 January 2019".
What individual mistake that Swisscom employee made, the media woman of the telecom giant did not want to reveal. Is there really a human problem behind it?
More than a reputational risk?
According to the insider portal "Inside Paradeplatz", this is a data incident of the extra class. This could even bring the authorities onto the scene. All data protection guidelines, which Swisscom would have to comply with, were violated by the telecom company. Now some bankers know what their colleagues have been doing with their phones. It can be assumed that among the 3,500 CS employees affected are also many senior executives. "Inside Paradeplatz" names renowned managers such as for example Serge Fehr, head of private banking, and Iqbal Khan, who, while not a Swiss employee, is head of International Wealth Management.
The corrected question is in fact: How does Swisscom, which in recent months has been repeatedly Data leaks (see Tages Anzeiger) against such far-reaching mishaps? After all, larger companies would always have to reckon with cyberattacks. In any case, the causes of the leak have not yet been sufficiently documented. On the other hand, nothing "went wrong" on the part of Credit Suisse, as the Swisscom spokeswoman emphasizes.
