Members of the Xbox Live community are losing their accounts and possibly more to hackers who are able to fool support personnel.

The hackers frequently will call the toll-free [Xbox Live support] number and pretend to be the owner of the account they want to take over. They will provide the Xbox Live ID and then ask for the physical address that’s associated with the account. Later, they’ll call back and ask for the phone number. Eventually, the hackers assemble enough information to convince a support person they are the rightful owners of the account.

The article goes on to report that this is not an uncommon occurrence. In fact, a search of Microsoft’s Xbox forums reveals just how frequently accounts are stolen, and given that Xbox live accounts contain information such as the user’s home address and credit card number, these attacks can prove very costly to customer privacy.

This should remind us that the strongest measures to secure data can be easily circumvented if appropriate policies and procedures are not in place to prevent employees from simply giving it away. Everyone who has access to sensitive information should have the means and the training to differentiate between thief and paying customer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 2:09 am by Mike Markiewicz and is filed under data theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.