Orange haven’t had the best of weeks this past seven days. First up, Orange registrations weren’t working, with consumers not able to activate their sims. Secondly, Orange Enable suffered an attempted hack, shutting down the whole system.

A number of consumers were complaining the back end of last week they couldn’t register their SIM cards properly. Some discovering that even though they successfully completed the process, it never activated and they had to repeat the whole operation again. Others weren’t able to do anything, only being told that the system was ‘down’.

This could be connected with the attempted hacking of the Enable system.

Orange discovered that someone was trying to download customer data from the credit checking and connection management system.

‘We recently became aware that a third party was trying to access our sales system which some of our sales channels use to register new customers and upgrade existing ones.’ Said an Orange spokeswoman.

It is believed the perpetrator was probably a reseller looking to contact Orange customers coming to the end of their contracts. Something which is normally a hit or miss affair when this kind of data is not available.

The whole system was suspended whilst new login details and passwords were reissued to users.

This is the second Orange security breach in the past five months. In November of last year a former Orange employee exposed a severe security lapse concerning consumer’s personal information, allowing staff to log onto customer databases anonymously.