With the recent leak of the private details of more than 4 million Vodafone Australia customers this week, it is being reported that the company may have to recompense the affected customers.

The leak of the personal details of the Vodafone Australia customers supposedly resulted from the fairly easy access to the customer database via dealer log-ins, which essentially enabled the users to view, at a glance, all personal details - including information pertaining to billing data and call histories - of Vodafone Australia customers.

This leak of private information of the Vodafone Australia customers largely leaves most of the other mobile firms, especially those that do not have adequate data protection mechanism in place, with an open back door which can easily be penetrated by virtual intruders.

A demonstration by a reporter for Australian news publication The Sunday Age showed that any person having a laptop and log in code could easily call up not only any user's address, driver's licence number, and date of birth, but also details of the time, location and destination of all phone calls and messages.

In the opinion of information security experts, the leak of Vodafone Australia users' data was not merely a case of customer details being accessed "over the Internet", but more of the notably poor database design that allows any person with a valid log-in to view all the personal details of every customer.