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In response to media enquiries regarding the Interactive Employment Service (iES) website technical problem, the Labour Department today (November 4) made the following statement:
The Labour Department is dedicated to strengthening the services of its iES website, with a view to facilitating job seekers in job search and employers in recruitment, by upgrading its interface and enhancing its functions from time to time.
In the course of a recent upgrading exercise on the iES website, a technical problem occurred and email acknowledgement receipts containing login names and passwords of other users (names and telephone numbers of users were not included) were accidentally sent out from 2pm to 2.55pm on November 1. Upon detection of the irregularities, the Labour Department took immediate remedial action and reset the passwords of all affected users by 3.30pm on the same day (November 1).
The Labour Department deeply apologises to all affected users for the inconvenience caused as a result of the incident.
After thorough investigation and scrutiny of the computer records, we have ascertained the extent of the impact of the incident on the affected users as follows:
* From 2pm to 2.55pm on that day, user names and passwords of 220 users were sent out to unauthorised users accidentally. Of these 220 users, 51 user accounts were found to have been logged into during the 1.5 hour period (from 2pm to 3.30pm). Our records, however, show that no amendments were made to the information of these 51 user accounts.
* We have informed all affected users of the incident by email and assigned staff to follow up with the 51 users whose accounts had been logged into. Of the 51 users, we have successfully contacted 40 of them. 31 confirmed the log-ins had been made by themselves, seven could not recall if they had logged in, and only two confirmed that they had not logged in during the affected period. We will follow up with the remaining 11 affected users as soon as possible.
The Labour Department will conduct a full investigation into the incident with a view to forestalling recurrence of any similar incident.
Ends/Thursday, November 4, 2010
Issued at HKT 18:15
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