Dixons Carphone have been issued a massive fine of £500,000 for a huge data security breach which displayed names, postcodes, private email addresses as well as unsuccessful credit checks of over 14 million customers.
On top of this, upon investigation from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) it was revealed that around 5.6 million credit/debit card details were also breached during the huge security attack between July 2017 and April 2018.
This is not the first fine The Carphone group has received. Back in July 2015 The Carphone Warehouse, part of the same group, had also been issued a fine of £400,000 for a similar data breach.
The Chief Executive, Alex Baldock, issued an apology to it’s customers, stating that they were extremely sorry for all the inconvenience caused, and that they had acted immediately to contain the breach once they had been aware of it, and had untaken added security measures. They notified the authorities instantly (Regulators and the police) and also informed all their customers. They stated that, thankfully they had no actual confirmed evidence that their clients had suffered any loss or fraud due to the attack.
Alex Baldock further went on to say that they had increased and upgraded their security measures, in both detection and response actions. The ICO acknowledges that the Carphone Group have made large investments into upgrading their Security and process systems.
The Carphone group have stated that they are extremely disappointed with some of the ICO’s findings, which they are continuing to challenge. They are studying the results in detail to find grounds to appeal.