Softbank customers sue over data leak

Compensation offer inadequate

By Tim Richardson • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 17th May 2004 14:23 GMT

Free whitepaper – Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

Japanese outfit Softbank Corp faces being sued after confidential information regarding 4.6m of its punters leaked out in March, according to the Mainichi Daily News.

Softbank - which together with Yahoo! operates broadband outfit "Yahoo! BB" in Japan - was the victim of a massive scam to extort billions of Yen from the company.

Although no credit or security information such as credit card numbers, passwords or records was made public, the giant security breach did include personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of application and email addresses.

In a bid to make amends, senior execs at Softbank in Japan said they would take a pay cut and offered to compensate those affected with a total pay-out of four billion yen (£20m).

But that means punters would only get around 500 Yen each - about £2.50. Now, three people have filed a lawsuit at the Osaka District Court and are seeking damages of 100,000 yen (£500) each. ®