StarNet 2015 Data Breach: 140,000 Moldovan ISP Customers Exposed

About StarNet

StarNet is a Moldovan internet service provider offering broadband, TV and telecom services to consumers and businesses in Moldova.

Why They Hold Your Data

An ISP holds subscriber identity and contact data, national ID (IDNP/IPN) numbers, phone numbers, email addresses and customer-interaction records.

Recent Developments

StarNet's customer database was stolen and published online in February 2015; the attackers were reported to have hit 760+ organizations.

Data Points Exposed

Breach Impact

The breach exposed a large share of a national ISP's subscriber base and drew attention to a broader hacking campaign against many organizations.

Exploitation & Downstream Threats

• Credential stuffing against reused passwords across other platforms | • Identity verification bypass using name + date of birth combination | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present | • Targeted phishing campaigns using exposed email addresses

What You Should Do

1. Freeze credit at all three bureaus and monitor for new-account and tax-refund fraud.
2. Reset any reused passwords and enable MFA on email first, then financial accounts.
3. Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
4. Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.

How ObscureIQ Can Help

1. Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
2. Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
3. ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).