News of the breach started to emerge last night (U.K. time), but events took a twist today when Harding revealed she had received an email demanding a ransom from a group claiming responsibility for the attack.
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“I do think that you see more cyber criminals wanting to effectively make money by extorting the companies that hold that data”, TalkTalk CEO Dido Harding told the BBC.
If confirmed by a Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit investigation, the breach would be one of the largest in United Kingdom history. The company said in a statement that the there was a chance that customers’ names and addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, telephone numbers, TalkTalk account information, and credit card/bank details may have been accessed.
Sensitive data including bank and credit card details belonging to as many as four million people may have been stolen in the cyber attack.
She said that there’s a with the system’s security update to prevent cyber threats that may affect their customers and the company.
Police are investigating the hack amid speculation the attackers could be Islamic terrorists or extortionists.
In contrast, its shares opened just 1.7 per cent lower after the attack was revealed.
TalkTalk is advising its customers, all of them, to immediately change any passwords associated with their accounts. The phone and broadband provider came under a “sustained” attack on Wednesday resulting in the potential loss of customers’ details. Harding said. “Well, you’ve got to say that we weren’t and obviously we will be looking back and reviewing that extremely seriously”.
A TalkTalk spokeswoman said, “We can confirm we were contacted by someone claiming to be responsible and seeking payment”.
“Sky’s technology correspondent Tom Cheshire said a Distributed Denial of Service attack was probably part of the hack: “(It’s) when a network is flooded with requests which it can’t respond to in time, so it shuts down. TalkTalk warned customers to watch their bank accounts carefully for evidence of fraudulent activity, and is offering a year’s free credit monitoring.
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Despite the fact that TalkTalk did respond quickly to the data breach, a few have criticized the company for discussing the breach publiclly before knowing all the details.
