14 DAY TRIAL // TalkTalk, one of UK's biggest telecommunications providers, blames a "significant and sustained cyber attack" on its website for a recent data breach that led to hackers stealing personal details of over 4 million of its customers.
The data breach was announced on Thursday by TalkTalk CEO, Dido Harding, who said that law enforcement authorities had been informed and that the company had started notifying affected clients.
While the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit is still investigating the security incident alongside TalkTalk's tech staff, for now, Mr. Harding has revealed that the following customer data "may" have been exposed: customer names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details, bank details, and information relating to TalkTalk accounts.
Besides contacting officials, TalkTalk has taken it a step further and contacted some of the banks of affected clients and asked them to monitor any suspicious financial activities.
Of course, the regular one free year of credit monitoring services is being offered to clients as well, but as proven many times in the past, this might be useless since attackers generally wait until the credit monitoring offer expires, before starting to use any of the stolen financial data in fraudulent purchases.
Not the first time this happened to TalkTalk this year. Not the second time either.
"We'd like to reassure customers that we take the security of your data very seriously," says Tristia Harrison, the company's Consumer Managing Director. "We constantly review and update our systems to make sure they're as secure as possible and we’re taking all the necessary steps to understand this incident and to protect them as best we can against similar attacks in future."
Ironically, this statement now looks very shallow and empty, since this is the third time this year TalkTalk has experienced a data breach.
The first incident occurred in February, affecting 4 million customers, and it was noticed only after fraudulent transactions started being made with customer data.
The second data breach took place in August, and affected 2.4 million customers of Carphone Warehouse, one of TalkTalks sister companies.
UPDATE: In a statement for BBC, Dido Harding said someone tried to extort the company during the cyber attack, posing as the hacker and requesting money to stop the attack.