The personal and financial details of as many as 2.4 million individuals might have been compromised as a result of a data breach suffered by U.K.-based mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse.
Carphone Warehouse’s parent company, Dixons Carphone, informed customers of the breach on Saturday. According to the company, the IT systems of a Carphone Warehouse division in the U.K. were hacked in a sophisticated cyberattack.
The affected division operates Mobiles.co.uk, e2save.com and OneStopPhoneShop.com. It also provides services to Talk Mobile, TalkTalk Mobile, iD Mobile, and certain Carphone Warehouse customers.
The intrusion, discovered on August 5, is being investigated in collaboration with a cyber security company. The police and the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) have also been notified of the incident.
The mobile retailer says attackers might have obtained the names, addresses, dates of birth, and bank details of up to 2.4 million customers. A majority of these records also include email addresses. Encrypted credit card data belonging to as many as 90,000 individuals may have also been compromised.
“This was the information we collect and store through the normal course of business, which involves credit checking in order to set up mobile phone contracts,” the retailer said in a FAQ.
Customers of other Dixons Carphone brands, such as Currys and PCWorld, are not impacted because their information is stored on separate systems.
Potentially affected customers are being notified and provided advice on how to reduce any risk. Carphone Warehouse says it hasn’t found any evidence that the accessed information has been sold or misused.
“We take the security of customer data extremely seriously, and we are very sorry that people have been affected by this attack on our systems. We are, of course, informing anyone that may have been affected, and have put in place additional security measures,” said Sebastian James, Group Chief Executive of Dixons Carphone.
Mobiles.co.uk and e2save.com are currently accesible, but OneStopPhoneShop.com has been taken offline.
Related Reading: The Snowball Effect of Data Breaches
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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