Last week we wrote about the issue Fasttelco users were having with their private information being publicly available online. Cnet/News.com have published an article covering this subject and this is the result of the user (36o/Abdulaziz), who reported the issue on the forum and then passed on the details of the glitch to Google. Apparently, Google have contacted Fasttelco and offered their services to help resolve the issue.
Hopefully some good can come from this and Fasttelco will reevaluate their users security (a price cut and promised speeds would be do wonders too).
Cnet / News.com article [here]
Our original post [here]
Posted by K.
Thanks Abdulaziz
8 replies on “Fasttelco glitches Google”
heheheh… thank YOU, K. I feel famous now 😀
heheheh.
~36o
Finally!
This is pretty alarming. I’m not sure why I missed that previous post as it was too interesting to miss!
Any clues yet as to why this would happen? DNS poisoning seems very unlikely
Might it be that the caches are sending cached pages along with their stored cookies? Ehh, that seems unlikey too (and probably wouldn’t work anyway.)
I’m stumped. Keep us informed!
The comments about the Cnet News.com article give the impression that this is just a Google/Gmail/Ebay issue. It’s NOT. I had the same problem with Amazon.com. I could see 4 or 5 other people’s account information (their carts, their wish lists, etc.). I called Amazon.com and they seem baffled, though they assured me that my account information would not be vulnerable. A few days later, the problem seemed resolved, and I have placed orders from Amazon since then. I am convinced, however, that this was NOT an Amazon problem. When I called Fastelco, they said that they were aware of a problem with Amazon which was due to a service they had outsourced. They claim that they have now brought that service in house and the problem has been resolved. BUT, they insist that they are completely unaware of any other problems with Gmail or Ebay, which is ridiculous! So many people have encountered this problem and have called Fastelco to find out what’s going on. Fastelco should be acknowledging the problem at least and, obviously, trying to fix it. It should be posting updates regularly on their website. THIS IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!
This is what i think is wrong! all of us over the last decade or so have put too much information on the internet about ourselves, personal information etc. We have to bow down to the ULTIMATE CONNECTED SYSTEM of todays world. For political agendas information can be retrieved so easily with punching a few keyboard buttons .. I guess in a way we are not free afterall!
“So many people have encountered this problem and have called Fastelco to find out what’s going on. Fastelco should be acknowledging the problem at least and, obviously, trying to fix it”
You know what is funny? When I called FastTelco to tell them about the problem, They told me its weekend and their engineers are taking the day off. I should call them back after the weekend! That really got me pissed. And I demanded to speak with the Supervisor and the guy ended up handing the phone to someone else who was also taking the problem slightly…
I only managed to draw their attention when I told them that I will contact the owners of the 30 emails i’ve accessed and saw their personal information (and pictures) and I will ask them to go with me to el ma5far and file a complaint against fast telco. only then they started acting like looking for solution.
No doubts all Kuwaiti ISPs are countered as low service providers. I started Gulfnet (Kuwaitnet) in the 1996. Moved to Kems, then to QualityNET in the 1999 to 2007, they were extremely discouraging. They never tried to visualize they may get a hint from you, bad service which was down four times a week during early morning hours. Moved to United Networks then, they got good servers and service, however, when a simple issue is reported they spend weeks to solve it due to inefficiency and dismissal of problem-rooting even if it was just changing the trace route to a certain data center. Fasttelco isn’t that bad. I believe there are some caching errors over there, however, they try to assist. They have never let me down when any assistance is needed. I requested changing the route to my data center dozens of times, they’ve never said NO! My website faced an issue with streaming videos due to their cache, they tried to fix the issue and when they could not they moved it out from cache where it does not pass through ever. Although this made retrieving files slower, but more efficient.
I tested 4Mbps of Rogers, Canada, the pioneers in communication. Their connection wasn’t as UP as Fasttelco, caching is good over there, however, connectivity, reliability in retrieving .com.country domains are bad somehow. Downloading/Uploading aren’t as good as here, BUT, we do not miss with their browsing speed of pages that hit!
You may would like to move to Satalites which provide UP/DOWN connection with pure 10-20Mbps from Russia or these kind of semi-European countries of the outer-union. Cost less, and professional service to be given.
I was interested in reading news.com article, thanks for sharing. Good luck guys.