The Information Commissioner’s Office is launching an investigation into the recent data breach at Carphone Warehouse.
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Speaking to the Irish Independent, Carphone Warehouse said it uses separate IT systems for Ireland and there are no signs of a breach.
The ICO, which is the UK’s official data watchdog, said that it looking into the breach, which has affected up to 2.4 million customers.
An investigation carried out by the company found that names, addresses, dates of birth and bank details of customers could also have been accessed.
This technique of DDoS as a smokescreen is becoming a more commonplace threat, especially for any internet-connected business that is housing sensitive data, such as credit card details or other personally identifiable information.
Carphone Warehouse is owned by Dixons Carphone after its £3.7 billion merger last year, also incorporates Currys and PC World. The company reportedly sent an email to anyone affected by the attack, alerting them to the situation and telling customers to be skeptical of any phone calls purportedly from the websites or services involved in the attack.
In the meantime, Carphone Warehouse customers took to Twitter asking why the company took three days to inform them of the data breach. “We recommend that you take the appropriate steps to protect yourself, such as closely reviewing account statements for suspicious activity”.
These types of frequent and sub-saturating DDoS attacks are typically intended to distract corporate security teams, but leave enough bandwidth available for a subsequent attack to infiltrate the victim’s network, much like the incident reported against Carphone Warehouse. He told us there’s something different about this one that’s worth noting.
The Carphone Warehouse’s Support Centre, in Acton, West London. “That’s an improvement over breaches that were discovered through credit card fraud and kept undisclosed for longer periods of time”, Erlin said.
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According to The Guardian, the company says that although the credit card data of 90,000 customers are stored in an encrypted form, these “may also have been accessed”.
