ForHacSec

 It seems the team at the popular tech news and review site TheRegister.co.uk didn’t quite have enough Coffee this Monday morning as they mistakenly sent an email out to 3,521 of it’s subscribers with the email address details of 46,524 of it’s readers. It seems a lot less people subscribe than actually read the articles.

The following article was published by ‘Team Register’ earlier today. Funny enough it didn’t stay in the main ”Top Story’ carousel for long and was then ditched to the ‘Security’ arena.

“By Team Register • Get more from this author

Posted in Site News, 24th October 2011 10:07 GMT

Between 8:58 and 10:20 BST this morning we sent an email to 3,521 of you that contained the names and email addresses of 46,524 of our readers.

Obviously, this was an error. The two-stage send process that is the norm for all of our mailers was over-looked because someone was in a hurry.

We would like to offer our genuine and humble apologies for the error.

If you would like to vent at that someone, their email address is here: data@theregister.co.uk.

We are in the process of blowing the whistle on ourselves to the ICO over the matter.”

Convenient how no one author, editor or department at TheRegister is owning up and simply posted the below somewhat comical apology below by ‘Team Register’. The whole article just seems as if it was purely a ‘tick box’ exercise to try and score some points with the ICO when it comes to investigation time. Given the somewhat lack of seriousness and professionalism the whole article presents with lines such as –

“If you would like to vent at that someone, their email address is here: data@theregister.co.uk.”

and

“We are in the process of blowing the whistle on ourselves to the ICO over the matter.”

We ourselves at ForHacSec.com were a victim of ElReg’s blunder and received the following email late in the day on Monday 24th October 2011.

“On 24 October 2011 18:35, The Register <marketing@theregister.co.uk> wrote:

Hello,

This morning the name and email address you used to register for The
Register was mistakenly sent to 3,521 individuals, also readers of
The Register.

We’ve contacted them asking them to delete the email and respect your
privacy.

We are of course terribly sorry for this error and have reported
ourselves to the ICO. Our initial statement is here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24/email_blunder/

You are free to edit or delete your account details here:

http://account.theregister.co.uk/register/

If you have any questions or would just like to rant at us please
send emails to mailto:data@theregister.co.uk

Best Regards
The Register”

It will be interesting to see the ICO’s report especially in to how the supposed ‘two stage’ send process was ‘over-looked’ and why it is possible for it to be ‘over-looked’.