Carphone Warehouse Licks Wounds After Hackers Steal 2.4 Million Customer Records
It seems as though hackers are having a field day when it comes to infiltrating both private and government computer networks. The latest victim is Carphone Warehouse, which just so happens to be the United Kingdom’s largest independent phone retailer.
According to various reports, Carphone Warehouse has revealed that as many as 2.4 million customer accounts have been compromised by sophisticated hackers. In addition, another 90,000 customers have possibly had their encrypted credit card details stolen.
Image Source: Martin Pettitt/Flickr
Dixon Carphone, the parent company of Carphone Warehouse, has been very apologetic about information breach and is contacting affected customers. The retailer also vows to close the security hole that hackers were able to infiltrate and further shore up its defenses against future attacks.
"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,” said Dixons Carphone CEO Sebastian James.
The breach was first discovered on August 5th, but it wasn’t until this morning that details of the attack were made public. And despite the fact that 2.4 million customer records seem like a rather large number, Carphone Warehouse is trying to set its customers at ease by indicating that the “vast majority” of its customers were unaffected by the breach.
In recent months, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management had over 21 million individual records stolen by Chinese hackers. And within the past two weeks, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff email system was breached. Russian hackers (either operating alone or working in conjunction with the Russian government) are suspected in the latter cyberattack.
