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A Quick Note – TalkTalk’s Latest UK Personal Data Breach and Website Woe

Friday, Aug 21st, 2015 (7:45 am) - Score 2,059

The Carphone Warehouse (CPW) recently suffered a massive breach of its customers personal data, which is believed to have potentially affected 2.4 million people, but not everybody seems to be aware of how this also affected other communications providers like TalkTalk.

The breach, which followed a “sophisticated cyber-attack” by hackers, was widely reported in the news as impacting CPW and as such some consumers may have skipped the news and thus might not be aware that it also hit various other associated providers.

In particular, CPW also runs TalkTalk’s mobile site (mobile.talktalk.co.uk), which along with the rest of the ISP was offline for most of this morning due to significant “maintenance” work. The related work was supposed to last from midnight to 6am, yet at the time of writing their primary websites and member account services are still down.

Unfortunately the data breach means that around 480,000 of TalkTalk’s mobile customers were potentially affected.

TalkTalk’s Statement

On Wednesday 5th August, our partners at Carphone Warehouse advised us that our mobile sales site (mobile.talktalk.co.uk), which they host, was subject to a sophisticated and co-ordinated cyber attack, along with a number of other similar websites.

As soon as they realised this, Carphone Warehouse shut down the sites. They’re now working with a leading cyber security firm to make sure our mobile sales website is completely secure.

However, we believe that some of our mobile customers’ data may have been accessed by the criminals. This includes customers’ names, addresses, dates of birth, bank details and other personal and TalkTalk account information.

For some of the affected customers, this may have also included their My Account username and passwords – for these customers, we have already suspended their accounts until they can reset their password.

We take our customers’ security very seriously, and we’ve already put in place additional security measures to prevent further attacks. We’ve also sent an email to all customers who we believe could have been impacted by this issue.

Sadly this is not the first time that personal data has been stolen from TalkTalk and another breach last year ultimately resulted in their customers being bombarded by a multitude of calls from spammers and fraudsters (here), which was exasperated by the providers failure to correctly inform its customer base in a timely fashion.

At least this time around they’ve been much quicker and more effective, albeit more on the information side than the security one. TalkTalk’s mobile customers are often also subscribers to the providers fixed line broadband and home phone products. A help page has also been setup, although at the time of writing this is not fully functional due to the protracted website “maintenance“.

UPDATE 12:39pm

The ISPs website(s) has now been down for over half a day, well past the original 6am target.

TalkTalk Status Update (9:55am)

Currently access to TalkTalk Website, TalkTalk sales for online orders, My Account and Webmail servcies are unavailable.

Customers will be unable to make any account changes, make payments either online or via phone, request upgrades or add boosts.

If you do need to call our colleagues to make any account changes or make payments etc, we do ask that you please call in the aftenoon.

We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience cause, and do assure you, our engineers are working to resolve this as quickly as possible.

Customers who require access to Web Mail services may be able to gain access via www.mail2web.com .

UPDATE 3:20pm

The site and services are back online, albeit a bit slower than usual.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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