TalkTalk hack ‘affected 157000 customers’

It follows the arrests of a 20-year-old man from Staffordshire, a 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland and a 16-year-old boy in West London.

The company is to contact affected customers in a few days, although warn them to be vigilant of scams.

Since the cyber attack on Wednesday 21st October 2015, TalkTalk has been working to establish exactly what happened and, importantly, understand the extent of any individual customer data stolen during this attack.

TalkTalk has revealed that 157,000 customers were affected by the recent website hack, confirming its suspicions that the attack was ‘smaller’ than first thought.

TalkTalk has announced that the details of 156,959 customers and 15,656 bank account numbers were accessed in last month’s cyber attack.

Throughout TalkTalk’s statement, the company reiterated its claim that the “financial information” pilfered during the security breach “cannot on its own lead to financial loss”.

TalkTalk’s investigation estimates that only 4% of its customer base have any personal data at risk.

In addition, 28,000 “obscured” credit and debit card numbers were accessed, but TalkTalk said these can not be used for financial transactions because the middle six digits had already been removed and customers can not be identified by the stolen data.

Arguments have been ongoing about exemptions from exit fees for customers seeking to leave the network, which has been connected with three apparent data breaches in the past year.

Concerns have since grown, with officials keen to examine how companies store and secure customer information, with TalkTalk attracting particularly strong interest.

The phone and broadband provider added that it had contacted all customers whose financial details were stolen and provided them with advice on how to stay safe.

Then there’s the fact this whole debacle is serving as a reminder to the general populace of how much they hate telcos – the dire customer service, the sneaky fee rises.