TalkTalk, a British Internet and phone provider, is the latest major company to suffer from a massive hack.
And its customers’ information is maybe being held ransom. “We have been contacted by an individual or group purporting to be the hacker,” Chief Executive Dido Harding told the BBC, “looking for money.” TalkTalk didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for more information about that request.
The company openly admits it’s still reeling from the attack, and is otherwise short on details, but announced Thursday that the attackers could have accessed the names, addresses, birthdays, contact information, TalkTalk accounts, and financial information of any number of its approximately 4 million customers.
The actual attack occurred Wednesday, the company said. London’s Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit got involved Thursday, and TalkTalk is offering a year’s worth of credit-monitoring services to victims, which is fast becoming an industry standard response.
Otherwise, TalkTalk has little to offer its customers besides some generic advice. “If you are contacted by anyone asking you for personal data or passwords (such as for your bank account), please take all steps to check the true identity of the organisation,” it says. That was good advice to anyone in the world before the TalkTalk hack, however, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Photo via Pink Sherbert Photography/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman and Fernando Alfonso III
