TalkTalk Telecom updates on October cyber attack

The company continues to advise customers to be careful and take the necessary precautions to protect themselves from scam phone calls and emails.

A parliamentary committee will conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the TalkTalk data breach and the wider implications for the security of personal information online.

Talk Talk said the total number of customers affected by the attack two weeks ago was 156,959, including 15,656 whose bank account numbers and sort codes were hacked.

Details about the TalkTalk data breach seem to surface daily, and it’s becoming quite hard to keep up with the news, the false reporting, and the silly things the company’s CEO sometimes says.

TalkTalk chief executive Dido Harding later said the scale of the attack was “smaller than originally suspected”, but this did not lessen the seriousness of the incident.

But the communications firm has stressed that the “information accessed can not on its own lead to financial loss”.

“Last month TalkTalk reported that it had been the subject of a significant and sustained” cyber attack which had potentially exposed the data it held on all 4 million of its customers to the hackers. Police have arrested four people in connection with the hack; a 15 year-old boy in Northern Ireland, a 16-year-old boy from west London, a 20-year-old man in Staffordshire, and a boy of 16 in Norwich.

The attack enabled cybercriminals to access the personal details of TalkTalk customers.

But it said “only” 4% of TalkTalk customers had sensitive personal data at risk and the 28,000 obscured credit and debit card numbers exposed could not be used for financial transactions. “We have also contacted major banks to inform them of the affected bank accounts”. Earlier this week, the 16-year old was released on bail.