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British mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse has suffered a hack which leaves almost 2.4 million customers wondering if their data was accessed.
According to a statement by the company on Saturday, it fell victim to what it dubbed as a sophisticated hacker attack, announcing that encrypted credit card information for 90,000 people might have been compromised. The attack was stopped on Wednesday immediately after it was discovered, but the breach was already in place for two weeks before that.
The investigation which followed revealed that multiple type of user data were accessible to the hackers, from names, dates of birth and addresses to bank details and security question answers. The hack itself affected online one division of the retailer, which provides services to multiple websites (mobiles.co.uk, onestopphoneshop.com and e2save.come) and also to iD Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile and a small part of the company’s own customers. So if you’ve recently purchased or offered personal data to these you might want to reset any passwords/codes just to be on the safe side.
Still, Carphone Warehouse will take the time to inform all customers which might have had their information accessed during the next couple of days, while also advising them on how to minimize the risks of suffering any kind of theft. The company has not announced if it will offer compensation to the potential victims of the hack, nor has it announced whether any of their customers suffered because of it. Carphone did though explain that the majority of its user data and customer info was held on other servers unaffected by the attack.
TalkTalk, one Britain’s greatest internet/mobile services provider, acknowledged the hack and announced that it will thoroughly check the affected site before bringing it back online. It will also be contacting all of its potentially affected customers to guide on what precautionary methods should be taken.
Massive hacks have stopped a Hollywood motive and have begun to be a serious reality in the recent past, with more and more high profile companies being hit. Last year’s Sony hack made the roundabout of global news, as did the OPM hack which might have affected over 22 million Americans. But massive internet companies have also had to deal with security flaws: Yahoo and Mumsnet were both victims of the Heartbleed OpenSSL-vulnerability discovered in 2014. Most recently, Russian hackers have also apparently made their way into the Pentagon’s email system.
Image Source: retail-week
