Vodafone suffered a cyber attack on Thursday with 1,827 customer accounts in Britain breached. The hackers gained access to the customers' bank sort codes, last four numbers of their bank accounts, names and mobile phone numbers.
A Vodafone spokesman, who confirmed the hacking on Saturday, says criminals used email addresses and passwords that they acquired from an unknown external source which led to the cyber attack, Reuters reports.
BBC says the email addresses and passwords were apparently purchased by cyber criminals from the dark web. Daily Mail reports that besides Vodafone, details of customers of 14 other major brands such as Visa, Sky TV, Amazon and Ticketmaster are also being sold, exposing the clients to a wide range of scams. The sale is for as low as £1.63, says Daily Mail, but the debit card information of Halifax account holders are selling for £10 each.
But only few customers whose data were exposed reported seeing attempts to use their information for fraudulent activities using their Vodafone account. While no credit or debit card numbers or details were stolen by the hackers, the affected subscribers are still at risk of being fraud victims and open them to phishing attempts, the Vodafone spokesman says.
Vodafone already informed the National Crime Agency, the Information Commissioner's Office and Ofcom of the hacking incident.
It is the second hacking of a British telecom firm after more than 20,000 unique bank account numbers and sort codes of TalkTalk were hacked last week. The teens were arrested with the cyber attack on the UK broadband, TV, mobile and fixed-line service provider last week.