Tag: TalkTalk

TalkTalk fined by ICO

11. August 2017

According to a Press Release from the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”), the TalkTalk Telecom Group (“TalkTalk”) was fined for violating the UK Data Protection Act. More than 21.000 customers could be the victims of scams and frauds.

As a result of an investigation in 2014, the ICO fined TalkTalk 100.000 GPB by failing to protect customer data. The breach was possible because of a lack of security of a portal holding a huge amount of customer data. One company with access to the portal was Wipro, an IT services company in India. 40 employees of Wipro had access to personal data of between 25.000 to 50.000 customers. During the investigation, three accounts were found that had unauthorized access to this portal. The ICO determined that TalkTalk did not ensure the security of the customer data held in this portal. There were different reasons:

  • The portal was accessible via any device. There was no restriction on which devices the portal can be accessed.
  • The search engine of the portal allowed wildcards searches (with * as a placeholder to get many results).
  • The search engine allowed up to 500 results per search.

The access rights were too wide-ranging regarding the high amount of customer data held by the portal. The ICO fined TalkTalk because it breached one of the principles of the UK Data Protection Act by not implementing enough technical and organizational measures.

Category: Personal Data · UK
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