It is being considered one of Britain’s largest data breaches. Hackers gained entry to Dixons Carphone and accessed 5.9 million credit cards.
There’s been another major data breach. This time, it has hit electronics retailer Dixons Carphone. Dixons Carphone said that the breach was uncovered thanks to a review of its systems and data. In response, they have notified authorities. Britains intelligence agency GCHQ is now investigating the incident. The breach itself is being called one of Britains largest data breaches, compromising roughly 5.9 million credit cards.
The Guardian is reporting on the incident:
“Anyone concerned about fraud or lost data should contact Action Fraud and we recommend that people are vigilant against any suspicious activity on their bank accounts,” the NCSC said.
Dixons Carphone said it had identified the massive data breach while it was reviewing its systems and data. The consumer electronics firm said there was an attempt to compromise the cards in a processing system at Currys PC World and Dixons Travel, but said there was no evidence of fraud as a result of the incident.
In a second breach, personal data such as names, addresses or email addresses have been accessed. Again, Dixons said there was no evidence that it had resulted in fraud.
Alex Baldock, its chief executive, apologised for the data breach and admitted the company had failed its customers.
“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.”
Baldock said the company had engaged cybersecurity experts to handle the matter and had added extra security measures to its systems.
This represents the fourth major data breach we’ve been able to report on. This month started with the MyHeritage data leak which saw 92 million accounts affected. TicketFly followed that up with a 26 million account data breach of their own. After that, PageUp suffered from their own data breach which saw 2 million users affected.
One thing is for sure, the theme for this month seems to be very large breaches. Not one we’ve reported so far was below 1 million accounts. One thing is for sure, this is certainly a worrying trend.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
