By Ryan Randazzo | Arizona Republic
An odd glitch involving the electronic-billing system at Arizona Public Service Co. resulted in nine customers’ bills from March 2017 showing up online, available to anyone.
APS officials are adamant the company was not breached by hackers and that no sensitive customer data was shared — simply names, addresses and how much electricity they used that month.
But the revelation comes at a difficult time for the utility. Regulators on Wednesday are scheduled to question the chief executive officer about a larger, systemic issue APS had with its website that provided customers bad advice on which rate plan to choose.
The customer bills showing up online was discovered by APS customer Steve Neil, who was searching Google for information about certain charges on his own bill.
One of the first links the search engine provided him was an actual customer’s bill. Neil, a programmer by trade, did another search and found it was a real person.
(Subscriber content)
