(copied and paster from elsewhere)
Ever heard of this so-called law firm, run by a Mr Andrew Crossley?
They've been sending out thousands of letters, demanding payments of £500 for copyright infringement based on people's IP addresses. BT, Sky and plusnet rolled over and handed over customers data, in BT's case, unencrypted. It's a similar scam to the one's the private parking companies use, sending threatening letters on the premise that a number of people will be scared into paying money...
Following a D-DOS attack, the ACS:Law website fell over, but when they restored it, they put all these customer personal details, plus loads of internal emails and spreadsheets on the public_html root folder, making it freely available for anyone to download.
For this massive breach of the Data Protection Act, ACS:Law are looking at a £500k fine..
It's all over the interweb now
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11425789
http://www.acslaw.blogspot.com/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/p2p-settlement-factory-expect...
http://www.slyck.com/story2058_ACSLaw_Email_Database_Leaked_onto_The_Pirate_Bay
This is potentially very serious, as the people who are on these lists are now open to a very real possibility of ID theft...
I was reading about this some time ago in the early development of it all going on, I'd totally forgotten about it until seeing this post. I hear the guy that ran it has fled to Greece of all places.
If you're stupid enough to torrent the latest movies and music then you deserve everything you get.
HEre's a question, if the firm gets fined, and then one of those people on the list does indeed become a victim of ID theft, could that person sue the law firm for leaking the details? I guess it'd be difficult to prove the theft was a result of the leak, but it would be karma I guess.
apparently they're already getting sued by the people on the list :-)
(servs them right)