UK Talk Talk Hack Could Cost Company £35m

Talk Talk’s chief executive, Dido Harding, has revealed that 157,000 of its customers personal details has been accessed and stolen by hackers

On October 21st, Talk Talk one of the UK’s major telecoms groups became yet another victim of hacking.

As a result of the hack, more than 15,000 of Talk Talk’s customers bank account details were stolen.

Talk Talk just the latest…

The scale of the cyber attack itself isn’t in itself, anything new. This year has seen a plethora of high profile hacks of well known companies and government agencies, with perhaps the most well known being the Ashley Madison hack earlier in the Summer. But it is not only companies that have had to face cyber criminals.  The US government directly implicated China for successfully hacking into Government agencies files.

What is most interesting about the Talk Talk hack, is the honesty and openness with which Harding has talked about the event. When the hack was first reported, Talk Talk admitted that they were ‘ initially uncertain as to the extent of the hack…’ The company also admitted that it was still too soon to measure the full impact on customers, but that it had still seen a large spike in customer defections as a result of the news.

Praise for Talk Talk Chief Executive?

Harding has received positive criticism for being as open about the scale of the hack as she has:

“When businesses do what’s right for customers throughout they actually emerge much stronger as a result…”

Harding did seem more concerned with the financial number than she did about the stress and alarm the hack caused to its customers.

Harding revealed the financial implications  the hack has had on the firms finances.

In an interview with the BBC, Harding said:

“The estimated one-off costs are between £30m and £35m – that’s covering the response to the incident, the incremental calls into our call centres, obviously the additional IT and technology costs, and then the fact that over the last three weeks until yesterday our online sales sites have been down, so there will be lost revenue as a result.”

Arrests and other hacks

The hack was the second time this year that Talk Talk had its online security breached. A February attack on Talk Talk systems not  allowed scammers to steal money. It more worryingly showed that not all of Talk Talk’s customer data was not encrypted. This has now been rectified.

UK police have arrested 4 people in connection with the cyber attack. The oldest was only 20 years old, while two of the others were 16 years old. The youngest was only 15.