Dive Brief:
- The price tag for last month’s cyberattack at TalkTalk Telecom Group may reach $53 million, the company said.
- However, the number of customers affected by the hack may have been far less than had been earlier predicted.
- TalkTalk said the total number of customers whose personal details were accessed was actually 156,959.
Dive Insight:
On Oct. 23, TalkTalk said it had been hit by a "significant and sustained cyberattack” potentially affecting four million customers.
Jens Monrad, a Copenhagen-based security expert for U.S. cyber defense firm FireEye, said samples of financial data which appeared to come from TalkTalk customers appeared to be for sale on the “dark web” shortly thereafter.
Police have since arrested four people in connection with the hack.
TalkTalk said costs of the hack would go towards “covering for lost revenue as the company's online sales sites were down for three weeks, additional IT and technology costs, higher number of calls to its call center, and the cost of responding to the incident.”
The October hack is the third so far for the company. Previous attacks were in December 2014 and February 2015.
