Just the other day, the New York Post outed Bloomberg reporters for monitoring Bloomberg terminals to track Wall Street traders’ accounts. Now, the Financial Times has pointed out another egregious but unrelated security problem: apparently more than 10 thousand confidential terminal records have been on the internet — searchable by Google — probably for years.
While doing a bit of investigative Googling, the Financial Times stumbled across the records — one from an isolated day in 2009, on from a day in 2010 — which included things like Bloomberg user identifiers, names, trader email addresses, financial price information, and trading activity. As soon as the Financial Times starting asking around, the records were promptly taken down, but it looks like they’d been out there for a while.
When asked about the records, a Bloomberg spokesman told the Financial Times that the information had been willingly supplied by a client, and posted with the purpose of helping that client improve data-mining.
Presumably, none of it was ever supposed to be public, though. It’s unclear if anyone stumbled upon these before the Financial Times did, but either way, it looks bad for Bloomberg that they were just sitting out there. And more bad publicity isn’t what Bloomberg needs right now. [Financial Times via The Verge]
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
