UK telecommunications agency TalkTalk has confirmed falling sufferer to a data breach after a risk actor boasted concerning the incident on a cybercrime discussion board.
The incident, the corporate informed information.killnetswitch in an emailed assertion, concerned a third-party platform and triggered instant containment measures.
“As a part of our common security monitoring, given our ongoing give attention to defending clients’ private knowledge, we have been made conscious of surprising entry to, and misuse of, one in every of our third-party provider’s programs,” a TalkTalk spokesperson mentioned.
The telecom supplier mentioned it was working with the third-party provider to resolve the difficulty, however wouldn’t share additional data, citing its ongoing investigation into the incident.
The data breach got here to gentle after a risk actor utilizing the title ‘b0nd’ introduced on a hacker discussion board they have been providing on the market the data of over 18.8 million TalkTalk clients, which was allegedly obtained this month.
In line with the risk actor’s publish, the exfiltrated data contains names, e mail addresses, cellphone numbers, IP addresses, and different data.
“Our investigations are ongoing, nonetheless we will affirm that the variety of potential clients referred to in sure on-line posts is wholly inaccurate and really considerably overstated,” TalkTalk informed information.killnetswitch.
On condition that TalkTalk has roughly 2.4 million clients, the 18.8 million quantity the risk actor was referencing was possible referring to the variety of information they could have stolen.
TalkTalk didn’t title the third-party provider that was concerned within the incident, however it seems that the data may need been stolen from CSG’s Ascendon platform, given the screenshots shared by b0nd on the cybercrime discussion board and CSG disclosing a cyber incident over the weekend.
Responding to a information.killnetswitch inquiry, a CSG spokesperson confirmed unauthorized entry to “a single supplier’s knowledge residing on a CSG platform” and mentioned that the corporate has no proof that its programs have been compromised “or that CSG was the reason for the surprising entry to the information”.
It seems that compromised login credentials may need been used to entry TalkTalk’s knowledge, however it’s unclear what number of people could be affected, because the CSG managed platform was not used to handle all TalkTalk clients.
TalkTalk beforehand suffered a big data breach again in 2015. Two people have been sentenced to jail in 2018 for that assault.
