British Airways suffers cyber breach
Advanced hackers have carried out a “malicious criminal attack” on the British Airways website
The cyber breach saw the theft of many of the airline’s customers’ names and email addresses as well as credit card information. Around 380,000 transactions have been affected. The hackers attacked the airline’s website and mobile app.
Alex Cruz, the chief executive of British Airways, apologised for the extremely sophisticated attack on the airline’s security systems; this was then followed by a newspaper print apologising to all customers.
The Information Commissioner’s Office is now looking into the breach, which could result in BA facing fines.
Rachel Aldighieri, managing director of the Direct Marketing Association, said:
“British Airways has a duty to ensure their customer data is always secure. They need to show that they have done everything possible to ensure such a breach won’t happen again.
“The risks go far beyond the fines regulators can issue – albeit that these could be hefty under the new [EU data protection] GDPR regime.”
The National Crime Agency and National Cyber Security Centre also confirmed they were assessing the incident.
Attacks like this threaten the trust between an organisation and its customer, with 58% of UK consumers ceasing to do business with organisations which have suffered a breach*
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*KPMG report – Small Business Reputation & The Cyber Risk