Symantec Data Leak Remains Under Investigation

Law enforcement is still investigating how credit card information belonging to a handful of Symantec customers from the United Kingdom fell into the hands of an identity theft ring.

Though speculation has focused on an employee of e4e, a call center in India, a spokesman for Symantec said its own investigation has reached no definitive conclusions. Symantec turned over all the information it gathered to authorities, and is moving forward with plans to terminate its relationship with e4e.

The situation came to light last week when reporters from the British Broadcasting Corporation bought the names, addresses and credit card information of three Symantec customers from a man identified as Saurabh Sachar in Delhi. According to BBC, the man claimed the numbers had been obtained from call centers handling mobile phone sales, and each of the customers had bought software from Symantec and given their credit card details to a call center over the phone.

“We have not had any problems with e4e in the past,” a Symantec spokesman said Wednesday. “We believe this is an isolated incident. Having said that, we were already in the process of examining options to move functions to another vendor for other business reasons that we’re not going to disclose, but the decision to do that was unrelated to this incident and was already in process before this incident came about.”

For its part, e4e has denied any theft in published reports. According to Symantec, the suspected e4e employee, however, has been placed on leave until the police investigation is complete.

“U.K. customers can still buy software over the phone, but at different numbers that go to alternative locations,” the Symantec spokesman said. “This was all a precaution.”