6 Million User Accounts of Three Mobiles UK Are At Risk After Major Data Breach
2016 is the year of Data Breaches. The list of 2016’s data breaches is very long and another data breach has been added by British Media Group “The Daily Telegraph” in this list recently. This breach belongs to famous UK Mobile Carrier “Three”. It is really a bad news for “Three” users because more than 6 Million user accounts are at risk. These user accounts contain personal information of users including full name, email id, contact number, residential address and date of births. The complete upgraded database of Three mobile carriers has been compromised by the hackers.
According to a Spokesperson of Three, “The Payment card details and bank account details of users were not available in breached database. Therefore users have no need to worry about it.”
How Did It Happen?
Hackers didn’t use any malware and exploit to compromise database of Three. They simply accessed the database of Three by logging in from an employee’s login credentials. This fact has been admitted by the company. Now the question is, how hackers managed to steal the login credentials of that employee? May be, hackers were keeping their eyes on Three’s employee or they have used any advanced key logger to trace his keyboard activities. This question is creating several doubts about the security system of the company. Luckily, breached database does not contain payment details of users.
How Hackers Can Misuse Stolen Data?
The breached database contains personal information of users. Hackers can find out that users, which are eligible for handset updates. Hackers can place orders for new mobile phones on the behalf of eligible users. After that, they can sell new handsets on the market at high prices. According to a company spokesperson, this type of mobile crime is increasing day by day and it also includes burglaries of Three retail stores.
National Crime Agency (NCA) of UK is investigating this incident and they also arrested three suspects related to this data breach on Wednesday. One 39-year-old arrested man is from Manchester (North-West-England), the second man is of 48-year-old and he is from Kent (southeast England). Both of these have been arrested by NCA on suspicions of Computer misuse offenses. The third suspect is also from Manchester and he was attempting to pervert the course of justice.
On the other hand, the company is using various type of techniques to make its systems secure for future.
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