Telecommunications giant TalkTalk suffered from cyber attack

If we are talking about the protection of personal information placed on your company's network, it has repeatedly been proved that no company can afford to ignore the damage that can be caused by cyber attacks . In addition, it is worth bearing in mind the fact that attacks can come from anywhere. And sometimes when establishing the culprits can be faced with interesting surprises.

After the news that the British telecommunications provider TalkTalk suffered from “significant cyber attack”, it was already reported that a 15-year-old boy was arrested in Northern Ireland who is suspected of involvement in this attack.
')
The cyber crime that occurred last week provided an opportunity to hack access to information related to more than four million customers of this company. Such data include bank account details and other personal data, which could potentially have serious financial consequences for the victims. After the publication of news about this attack, TalkTalk shares fell by 12%, and some customers said that money had already disappeared from their accounts. From this point on, it became clear that the company could face millions of pounds of lawsuits from affected customers. The consequences of the attack and the loss of stock value showed that the company has already lost about 360 million pounds since last Thursday.

While investigating how the cyber attack was carried out, the company first reported that it suffered from a continuing DDoS attack — a distributed attack in a denial of service — when the website was bombarded with a huge amount of requests and traffic. These actions were accompanied by attempts to break into SQL (a special technique that hackers use to gain access to the database using special actions via web forms hosted on the site). By the way, it is quite easy to defend against these types of attacks, and therefore many experts in the field of information security expressed surprise that the attack was successful, especially considering the good achievements of modern IT security solutions.

This is not the first time TalkTalk has become a target for cyber criminals. Less than a year ago, the company fell victim to three security breaches. Then the head of the company Digo Harding said that all companies are at risk of being a victim of cyber criminals, whose actions become "a crime of our age."

“This happens all the time with a large number of organizations. The terrible truth is that every company, every organization in the UK has to spend more and more money and pay more attention to cybersecurity issues - these are crimes of our era ”

At the moment, the investigation is carried out by the Information Commissions Officer (ICO) and the metropolitan police, and they have doubts about whether the company was reliably protected or not. An ICO spokesman said that “organizations must be confident that they provide an adequate level of security in matters related to protecting the customer information they have. If they are not sure, then we will act. ”

Taking into account all the above, a cyber attack on your company can have a negative impact not only on its reputation, but also on its position in the industry. It can also cause major financial damage and lead to lengthy litigation with clients. In this regard, we recommend avoiding common mistakes made by other companies in order not to suffer from data hacking.