At the end of last week TalkTalk informed their broadband and phone customers that “less than” 1.2 million customer email addresses, names and phone numbers had been compromised by the cyber-attack on their website (here), but today this has been sharply revised down to the figure of 156,959.
The attack, which was the result of a combined Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault and later an SQL Injection exploit against TalkTalk’s site, has since been followed by the arrest of four people; three of which are young teenage boys. Sadly many of those cases won’t be heard until next year.
In the meantime the on-going investigation by both TalkTalk and the Metropolitan Police has now revealed that the scale of this attack was much smaller than stated last week.
TalkTalk Cyber Attack Update – 6th Nov
Further to our update on Friday 30th October we are now able to confirm which customers were affected:
* The total number of customers whose personal details were accessed is 156,959;
* Of these customers, 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes were accessed;
* The 28,000 obscured credit and debit card numbers that were accessed cannot be used for financial transactions, and were ‘orphaned’, meaning that customers cannot be identified by the stolen data.Our ongoing forensic analysis of the site confirms that the scale of the attack was much more limited than initially suspected, and we can confirm that only 4% of TalkTalk customers have any sensitive personal data at risk. However, we continue to advise customers to be vigilant, and to take all precautions possible to protect themselves from scam phone calls and emails.
It was a difficult decision to notify all our customers of the risk before we could establish the real extent of any data loss. We believe we had a responsibility to warn customers ahead of having the clarity we are finally able to give today.
We have now contacted all customers who have had financial details accessed, reiterating our advice on what to do to keep themselves safe. The financial information accessed cannot on its own lead to financial loss. We will be contacting all other affected customers in the coming days.
We want to make customers aware that we will not call or otherwise contact them regarding this incident and ask for bank details or other financial or personal information.
The news is good-ish, although we’re hesitant to adopt any kind of celebratory tone given the fact that 156,959 is still a huge number of people. We’d also like to hear what actions TalkTalk are taking to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
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Lets hope there are not too many stories like this going forward
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/05/talktalk_offers_customer_30gbp_final_settlement_after_crims_nick_3500gbp/
That’s exactly how they treated customers on their forums during the data breach at the beginning of the year – they don’t let people out of their contracts penalty free. The only offer they’ll make is to deal with customers on a case by case basis – that is, divide and conquer, pick off the noisiest customers one by one and sweep it all under the carpet.
I don’t think that they are legally able to hold you to a contract that broke down; whoever
was at fault, an agreement should be between the only parties involved -not everyone else and their dog, certainly not because one party was being run so negligently that a couple of unrelated children could hack it.
And what is “less than” 1.2 million victims?
Is it anything like much more than 1.2 million.
It reminds me of the Cadbury’s chocolate factory in manchester (still operating BTW) that has a minor problem with leaking sewage. “Only a little” got into the manufacturing process. Eat shit!
Is it anything like much more than 1.2 million.
I meant: Is it anything like much more than 1.1 million.
Where is the edit button?