TalkTalk, the major UK consumer telecommunications services provider, suffered a data breach in October 2015 that put the personal details of 4 million customers at risk.
The total number of customers affected has since been estimated to about 157,000 individuals, but the public announcement seems to have left a bad taste in customers’ mouths.
Back in November, the company estimated losses between £30 million to £35 million but has since claimed they are on the trajectory to lose between £75 million and £80 million.
The total cost of this breach includes a lump sum of £40 million-£45 million, an estimated £15 million loss on impact trading, and £20 million from its reduced customer base.
Since the breach, TalkTalk has lost more than 100,000 customers, and while this number may represent only a sliver of its entire customer base, the impact on its reputation has been significant.
From the sky high clean-up costs that come with suffering from a breach to the impact of reputational damage to a brand, the consequences of being vulnerable to attacks can have serious impacts on a business.
Implementing sophisticated cyber security solutions into an organization's IT environment are more necessary than ever before. With hackers harnessing more and more powerful methods of attack, businesses and people alike need to be vigilant. While financial losses are a major setback, reputational damage can be just as destructive if not more. In fact, over 85% of consumers said they wouldn’t use a website or online service again if their details were stolen from that website.
In the wake of these harmful UK data breaches, it's vitally important that organizations of all sizes remain armed against any possible cyber-attacks, promote security training to make your organization aware & educated on the evolving cyber threat we now face, and introduce IT compliance solutions that will help build up your cyber defenses.
NNT’s Change Tracker Gen7 provides you with Continuous File Integrity Monitoring, recording changes to any binary system or application file as well as to any text-based configuration file, recording who made the change and what changed. Gen7 learns the difference between good & bad changes, automatically promoting legit changes to planned changes, leaving behind only potentially harmful, unplanned changes for you to review.
Read this article on Information Age