Internet provider fined £ 400,000 after hacker attack with client data leakage

About 150 000 clients of the British Internet provider TalkTalk became known in the fall of 2015 about hacking and subsequent theft of personal data. A year later, the British information protection regulator (Information Commissioner's Office, ICO) issued the company a record fine of £ 400,000 (more than 30 million rubles) for security flaws that allowed hackers to carry out such a large attack.

As stated by the head of the ICO Elizabeth Denam (Elizabeth Denham), in the case of TalkTalk it was about neglecting the basic principles of information security.
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“This record fine serves as a warning to other companies. They need to understand that data protection is not a question of the IT department, but the task of top management. Working in this direction is not necessary to fulfill the requirements of regulators, but from a sense of responsibility to our customers. ”

As it turned out during the investigation, the cause of the data leak was the use of outdated software for working with databases - it remained in the company's infrastructure since 2009, when TalkTalk acquired a competing provider Tiscali, who used these tools. As a result, attackers were able to access these users with simple SQL injections on three vulnerable web pages.

The investigation revealed problems in the implementation of basic information security measures, in particular, the operator’s employees did not install patches for known vulnerabilities in the software they used. As a result, the attackers were able to easily penetrate the network.

TalkTalk published a statement in which it stated that from the very beginning, it behaved "openly and honestly" with customers and government officials:

Over the past year, nine out of ten large British companies were hacked, and in the event of an attack on TalkTalk, we decided to act openly and honestly towards our customers from the very beginning. This gave them the opportunity to protect themselves in the best possible way, and we are convinced that the chosen approach was right for clients and our business.

The company's problems were not limited to a record fine - after the news that during the quarter after the cyber attack, it lost 101,000 customers, and revenue fell by £ 80 million, the price of TalkTalk shares also fell by 11%.

Cyber ​​attacks can be difficult to prevent, large-scale leaks can be prevented, and the consequences of information security incidents can be mitigated by using specialized means of protection - for example, using the new MaxPatrol SIEM LE software and hardware.

You can learn about the main characteristics of this product, its advantages, as well as how to use this complex for identifying information security incidents in real time, on October 13 at 14:00 at the free webinar of Maxim Prahova, product marketing manager at Positive Technologies.

Register for the webinar here: www.ptsecurity.com/ru-ru/research/webinar/115214