British telecoms giant TalkTalk has confirmed it is investigating a data breach after hackers claimed to have stolen the personal information of millions of customers.
In a post on a popular cybercrime forum seen by TechCrunch, an individual using the alias “B0ND” claimed to have stolen the personal data of more than 18.8 million current and former TalkTalk subscribers. This data that threat actors are offering for sale likely includes customer names, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and subscriber pins.
In a statement to TechCrunch, TalkTalk spokesperson Liz Holloway confirmed that the company is investigating the data breach, but said the 18.8 million figure claimed by the hackers is “completely inaccurate and highly “It's exaggerated,” he said.
TechCrunch understands that TalkTalk currently has approximately 2.4 million customers.
“Given our continued focus on protecting our customers' personal data, we became aware of the unexpected access and misuse of our third-party supplier's systems as part of our normal security monitoring,” Holloway said. told TechCrunch. “Our security incident response team continues to work with the supplier on this issue and protection rating steps were taken immediately.”
Holloway declined to name the third-party supplier, but screenshots shared by B0ND suggest the data was stolen from CSG's Ascenden platform, which TalkTalk uses for subscription management. .
CSG did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's questions.
TechCrunch understands that the personal details of a small subset of TalkTalk's customers are stored on Ascendon. Holloway confirmed to TechCrunch that “no billing or financial information is stored on this system.”
TalkTalk was fined £400,000 after a 2015 data breach in which hackers stole the personal data of 157,000 customers, including financial information. Britain's Information Commissioner said at the time that TalkTalk had failed to implement “the most basic cybersecurity measures”, allowing hackers to “easily penetrate the system”.