Corn Belt Inadvertently Publishes Members’ Account Info on Site

By Michelle Koetters, The Pantagraph, Bloomington, Ill.

Feb. 1–BLOOMINGTON — About 2,000 Corn Belt Energy Corp. members who wanted to opt out of the company’s new charity program had some of their account information inadvertently published on the utility’s Web site.

The file contained the names, utility account numbers and e-mail addresses for members who had filled out an online form to opt out of the Bloomington-based electric cooperative’s Operation Round Up donation program, which began Jan. 1, spokesman Dave Hawkinson said.

A co-op member notified the company on Saturday after the member had discovered the information listed, Hawkinson said.

“Immediately, we responded by closing that off,” Hawkinson said Thursday. “It’s fixed.”

Identity theft is not a concern in this instance, said Natalie Bauer, a spokeswoman for the Illinois attorney general’s office. The issue does not appear to be a violation of a consumer fraud law because personal or financial information that someone could use to steal an individual’s identity, such as bank or credit card account numbers, was not a part of the file, Bauer said.

Corn Belt does not have plans to notify individual co-op members of the issue because no other personal information was included in the file, Hawkinson said. The files were for customer service representatives to access for business reasons and for the company to keep a tally of members who had opted out of Operation Round Up, he said.

“It was information held in the opt-out files,” Hawkinson said. “The personal nature of the information has not been compromised. It’s an e-mail account.”

If members think they have received spam e-mail as a result of the leak, or think their information has been compromised in some way, they should contact Corn Belt, Hawkinson said.

Corn Belt launched the program to help local charities with money raised from rounding members’ bills to the nearest dollar. All members automatically were enrolled in the program but could opt out through the online form or by contacting the company.

To date, about 6,300 of Corn Belt’s 32,500 members have opted out, and about one-third have done so through the computer, Hawkinson said.

The electric supplier devised the online form as a convenient way for customers to withdraw from the program, Hawkinson said. When the system was established, the company believed it had taken the appropriate steps to safeguard customers, Hawkinson said.

“We do have a number of firewalls in place,” he said.

The average computer user would not have gained entry to the file, but someone with a great deal of computer skill could open it, Hawkinson said.

Information technology personnel have double-checked the security of the online system now, Hawkinson said.

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