Dixons Carphone said today that it had suffered a massive data breach involving 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal data records. The hack attempt which began July 2017 is still under investigation by Dixons Carphone they said.
The news comes months after the Information Commissioner’s Office handed “Carphone Warehouse” a massive fine of £400,000 after serious failures placed customer and employee data at risk. After one of their computer systems was compromised as a result of a cyber-attack in 2015, it transpired that the compromised customer data included: names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, marital status and, for more than 18,000 customers, historical payment card details.
Carphone Warehouse announced they would merge with Dixons in 2014.
Dixons Carphone published a press release today about the latest breach that again shows how likely a cyber attack is and how important it is to be proactive and to have appropriate cyber insurance in place.
Our investigation is ongoing and currently indicates that there was an attempt to compromise 5.9 million cards
in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores.…
Separately, our investigation has also found that 1.2m records containing non-financial personal data, such as
name, address or email address, have been accessed.
Dixons Carphone Chief Executive, Alex Baldock, said:
“We are extremely disappointed and sorry for any upset this may cause. The protection of our data has to be at the heart of our business, and we’ve fallen short here. We’ve taken action to close off this unauthorised access and though we have currently no evidence of fraud as a result of these incidents, we are taking this extremely seriously. We are determined to put this right and are taking steps to do so; we promptly launched an investigation, engaged leading cyber security experts, added extra security measures to our systems and will be communicating directly with those affected. Cyber crime is a continual battle for business today and we are determined to tackle this fast-changing challenge.”
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