Personal data belonging to up to 21,000 TalkTalk customers could have been used for scams and fraud

The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined TalkTalk Telecom Group PLC £100,000 after it failed to look after its customers’ data and risked it falling into the hands of scammers and fraudsters.

An ICO investigation found TalkTalk breached the Data Protection Act because it allowed staff to have access to large quantities of customers’ data. Its lack of adequate security measures left the data open to exploitation by rogue employees.

The breach came to light in September 2014 when TalkTalk started getting complaints from customers that they were receiving scam calls. Typically, the scammers pretended they were providing support for technical problems. They quoted customers’ addresses and TalkTalk account numbers.

The ICO launched an investigation into how customer details – names, addresses, phone numbers and account numbers - were compromised.

Still using TalkTalk? Had enough?

Contact Donline for a chat about a decent ISP: Utility Warehouse.

Read more at: Information Commissioner's Office

TalkTalk to axe hundreds of jobs, £120m cost cuts

TalkTalk is set to cut hundreds of jobs in a sweeping effort to slash costs by £120m, as the debt-burdened broadband provider embarks on a radical restructure to restore its financial health.

In an update to investors last week, the company confirmed a “radical” overhaul, with initial redundancies already under consultation. Around 130 positions are set to go at its Salford-based consumer division, while further reductions at its wholesale arm—known internally as Platform X—are expected to push total job losses into the hundreds.

The cuts are anticipated to fall heavily on central head office roles after TalkTalk admitted that multiple business units and management layers had weighed down operating expenses. The company reported a workforce of 1,857 in February, two-thirds of whom were in administrative roles.

The redundancies form part of a wider cost-cutting agenda targeting more than £120m in savings, around 60% of which TalkTalk intends to achieve within the next 12 months. Alongside job losses, the cost reduction plan is expected to encompass the sale of non-core businesses, office closures, and tighter controls over marketing, travel, and catering budgets.

In addition, TalkTalk plans to automate more tasks, ramp up its use of artificial intelligence, and consider outsourcing and offshoring options to streamline operations.

TalkTalk: how to take a awful Internet Service Provider - & make it worse! Want to move to an ISP that offers high quality & keen prices? Speak to Donline about Utility Warehouse!

www.bmmagazine.co.uk

TalkTalk sued by scam victim

A former TalkTalk customer, Michael Robinson, is taking British broadband provider TalkTalk to court after they were hacked and he suffered at the hands of scammers.

The scammers exploited information about TalkTalk customers (including names, dates of birth, address, email address, phone numbers, full bank account numbers and sort codes) seemingly stolen through an elementary SQL injection attack on the TalkTalk website.

https://www.grahamcluley.com/

Internet Service Provider TalkTalk probes possible UK data breach

UK ISP and TV provider TalkTalk says it's currently investigating claims made on cybercrime forums alleging data from the company was up for grabs.

An individual using the handle "b0nd" laid claim to a batch of data, which they claimed relates to nearly 19 million current and former customers of the British telco.

A TalkTalk's head of external comms, Liz Holloway, confirmed to The Register that the company was looking into the claims: "We're aware of these posts, we're investigating it at the moment.

"We think it relates to an external standalone data platform application that manages a small part of our customer base, but that's obviously owned and managed by an external third party."

The investigation is still in the very early stages and the third-party supplier wasn't identified, but it's understood the platform in question doesn't store billing details or any other sensitive information of that ilk.

Not great, but does sound familiar... Cast your mind back a few years - when a Boy (17) pleaded guilty to the infamous TalkTalk hack where personal data belonging to up to 21,000 TalkTalk customers could have been used for scams and fraud. Also, they are having significant financial issues at the moment.

www.theregister.com

Britons get 'bad deal' from broadband giants

Britons who get their broadband from the UK's biggest suppliers are the "most likely" to be getting a bad deal, reports Which?

The consumer group's latest broadband satisfaction survey places the big providers at the bottom of rankings for service.

Customers complained about slow speeds, poor value for money, connection dropouts and general service problems.

TalkTalk and Sky are the two firms at the bottom of the satisfaction survey.

The UK's four big providers, BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin, supply 90% of the UK's net-using homes with broadband.

The Which? results put TalkTalk at the bottom of the table for customer satisfaction and say it "failed to score well in any category".

Which? figures suggest that TalkTalk customers are most likely to experience slow browsing speeds and connection dropouts. In a statement, TalkTalk said the results were "disappointing".

Fed up of poor service from your Internet Service Provider? 

Contact Donline to find out about a better way:
Utility Warehouse and Zen Internet.

www.bbc.co.uk

Debt-laden TalkTalk offloads customers in scramble to raise funds

TalkTalk has offloaded swathes of customers to a start-up rival as it scrambles to raise cash.

The deal to sell 120,000 customers to fledgling provider Rise Fibre marks the latest effort by the debt-ridden broadband provider to shore up its balance sheet. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.

It comes as the broadband firm, which was founded by Sir Charles Dunstone, struggles under a £1.4bn debt pile.

TalkTalk secured a £115m lifeline from Ares Management and other shareholders, including £65m in fresh debt, earlier this year.

This was less than 12 months after backers were forced to provide a £235m emergency bailout to avoid a looming debt default.

The deal with Rise Fibre marks the latest whittling down of TalkTalk’s customer base after it reached an agreement to sell 29,000 subscribers to Utility Warehouse for £5m earlier this year.

Is TalkTalk currently your Internet Service Provider? If so - do not wait for the inevitable to happen. Contact Donline about moving to a quality ISP. 

www.telegraph.co.uk

TalkTalk just can't do any good - now blocking TeamViewer!

A spokeswoman for the UK ISP TalkTalk confirmed it had blocked "a number of sites and applications" including TeamViewer from its network to protect customers from phishing and scamming activities.

The company said it was working with TeamViewer and other third parties on implementing some additional security measures to enhance security.

TeamViewer is one of the most popular pieces of software to enable remote access. It was also used by hundreds of scammers attempting to defraud TalkTalk customers by gaining remote access to their computers.

This is what is known as throwing away the baby with the bathwater, while blaming other parties! 

Donline & many other reputable IT support companies spend significant sums of money to license TeamViewer to support our clients.

TalkTalk however doesn't have a particularly glowing reputation when it comes to security!

If you have had enough of the numpties at TalkTalk - contact Donline to discuss quality alternative ISPs.

www.theregister.co.uk

TalkTalk most complained-about broadband provider

TalkTalk has been named as the most complained-about broadband firm in the UK, according to the latest report from regulator Ofcom.

The watchdog received nearly 250 complaints a day about communications services from July to September 2017.

The Post Office came out worst for landline services and Vodafone received most complaints from mobile users.

In response, TalkTalk said closure of customer service centres in India had been partially to blame. "That move, and a radical shift to self serve, is already delivering a material improvement in customer satisfaction and we expect complaint data for 2018 to reduce significantly," the firm said in a statement, adding that it was "disappointed" by the figures.

TalkTalk and BT received the worst customer satisfaction scores in a survey of 12 broadband providers, conducted by Which last year.

www.bbc.co.uk

Inside the TalkTalk "Indian scam call centre"

TalkTalk customers are being targeted by an industrial-scale fraud network in India, according to whistleblowers who say they were among hundreds of staff hired to scam customers of the telecoms giant.

The scale of the criminal operation has been detailed by the three sources, who say they were employed by two front-companies set up by a gang of professional fraudsters.

The sources describe working in "call centres" in two Indian cities.

They say as many as 60 "employees" work in shifts in each office, phoning TalkTalk customers and duping them into giving access to their bank accounts.

The whistleblowers say they were given a script in which they were told to claim they were calling from TalkTalk.

www.bbc.co.uk

TalkTalk data breach customer details found online

TalkTalk failed to inform 4,545 customers their personal information, including bank account details, were stolen as part of the 2015 data breach.

Viewers contacted BBC Watchdog Live about concerns that their details had been breached by TalkTalk. But the company had told them that their details were not compromised.

"The customer data referred to by BBC Watchdog relates to the historical October 2015 data breach. It is not a new incident," the firm said.

The BBC consumer show investigated and found the personal details of approximately 4,500 customers available online after a Google search.

The details included full names, addresses, email addresses, dates of birth, TalkTalk customer numbers, mobile numbers and bank details for thousands of customers.

The information is likely to have been online since the breach, without the knowledge of the people affected.

www.bbc.co.uk

More TalkTalk bad news: Wi-Fi router passwords stolen

TalkTalk broadband customers' wi-fi passwords have been stolen following a malware attack that blocked their internet access last week.

The researcher who discovered the issue said other details had also been taken that would let attackers pinpoint where the equipment was being used, making more targeted hacks possible.

Donline note: frankly I'm amazed that people still use TalkTalk. 

If you have had enough of this shoddy ISP - contact me!

www.bbc.co.uk

Assume Nothing: a podcast detailing the TalkTalk hack in 2015

October 2015 - TalkTalk: One of the UK’s most high profile cyber-attacks. The attack saw the personal details of 156,959 customers accessed, including the bank account number and sort code of 15,656 customers.

For a couple of weeks in 2015, Dido Harding was a regular fixture on UK news reports as she attempted to answer technical questions about the “sequential attack” against TalkTalk, and struggled to clarify what customer data had been exposed, and whether it had been encrypted or not.

Some think it’s the work of cyber jihadis, but the truth is much closer to home. This is the story of how teenage clicks crippled a communications giant. 

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds

TalkTalk’s ex-CEO Dido Harding heads up the UK’s Coronavirus tracing app! What could possibly go wrong?...

The UK has decided to develop a smartphone app that might help quickly trace recent contacts of anyone with the coronavirus. But, unlike many other countries, you are trialling a “centralised” model app, which requires the potentially sensitive data on a central computer server rather than the alternative, “decentralised” model proposed by Apple and Google, where information stays on people’s handsets.

Obviously calming people’s understandable privacy and security concerns about such an app is going to be an important factor to increase chances that a decent proportion of the public will download it.

So, who does the UK government appoint to head up the NHS COVID-19 tracing app? None other than Baroness Harding of Winscombe. Perhaps better known to you and me as Dido Harding, the former CEO of TalkTalk.

Yup, that's right - Dido (not this one!) who was the head of TalkTalk - at the time of a massive data breach! The hack which used a SQL injection attack, combined with leaving database software unpatched 3.5 years after a fix was available (watch the video here for the full train wreck). Frankly she wouldn't have been my choice for this role! Lets hope dear Dido pays a bit more attention to data security on this project - for all our sakes...

www.grahamcluley.com

As teenager admits hack, let's not forget TalkTalk's shameful security

TalkTalk would love the world to think that they suffered a highly sophisticated and sustained attack. The truth, however, is that they fell foul of a bog standard SQL injection attack - the type that any decent web programmer has been hardening their systems against for the last 20 years or so.

As described in this video, the SQL injection attack, combined with leaving database software unpatched 3.5 years after a fix was available, and not putting better monitoring systems in place after earlier attacks, meant that TalkTalk was easy prey for a 16-year-old hacker to breach their systems.

The boy, now 17 years old, pleaded guilty at Norwich Youth Court today to seven charges under the Computer Misuse Act.

TalkTalk and Vodafone top complaints chart again

TalkTalk has again been named the most complained-about broadband company in the UK, in the latest report from the telecoms regulator Ofcom.

For every 100,000 TalkTalk customers, about 31 made a complaint to Ofcom about the company's broadband services between October and December 2017.

Technical faults were the main reason for complaints, according to the report.

BT and Vodafone were the most complained-about mobile operators.

Ready for better service & smaller bills? 

Talk to Donline about moving to the Utility Warehouse!

www.bbc.co.uk

Broadband ISP TalkTalk Issue Trading Update and Explores New Ownership Structures

The TalkTalk Group has today published a very brief trading update for the half year ended 31st August 2025, which largely only highlights the positives (unlike their annual accounts) and claims to have “delivered a solid first-half performance“. The group is currently aiming to tackle its debts by targeting £146m in total savings by FY28.

The group, which recently launched a major brand refresh and advertising push for its consumer broadband ISP business, is currently still doing everything it can to cut costs and to tackle their underlying debt problem; including the possible disposal (sale) of its remaining businesses and more job cuts.

All of this follows last year’s £400m refinancing package, which avoided the immediate risk of a default on its debts, and the recent £120m funding deal (here). Sadly, the latest results for H1 FY26 fail to add much detail to the current overall picture of the business, but it does highlight a few of the recent positives. READ MORE...

www.ispreview.co.uk

TalkTalk and Post Office routers hit by cyber-attack

Thousands of TalkTalk and Post Office customers have had their internet access cut by an attack targeting certain types of internet routers.

A spokeswoman for the Post Office told the BBC that the problem began on Sunday and had affected about 100,000 of its customers.

Talk Talk also confirmed that some of its customers had been affected, and it was working on a fix.

It is not yet known who is responsible for the attack.

www.bbc.co.uk

TalkTalk fined £400,000 for theft of customer details

TalkTalk has been fined a record £400,000 for poor website security which led to the theft of the personal data of nearly 157,000 customers.

The cyber attack on its website took place in October 2015.

The Information Commissioner's Office, which imposed the fine, said security was so poor that the attack succeeded "with ease".

www.bbc.co.uk

TalkTalk and BT rated worst for broadband in Which? survey

TalkTalk and BT have received the worst customer satisfaction scores in a survey of 12 broadband providers.

They scored 38% and 45% respectively with their customers, while Sky (48%) and EE (49%) came close behind them in the Which? survey of 1,800 people.

Frequent price rises, connections that drop, unreliable speeds and "woeful" customer service all contributed to the scores, the consumer group said.

The four account for almost three-quarters of the UK broadband market.

BT alone accounts for almost a third of the country's broadband connections.

Five stars?

Zen Internet had the highest customer rating at 86% in the survey, followed by Utility Warehouse (81%), John Lewis Broadband (68%), SSE (66%) and Plusnet (65%)

Virgin Media (52%), Vodafone (50%) and the Post Office (48%) were also included.

www.bbc.co.uk

"Don't leave home"! Dido (Harding) to head UK's Institute for Health Protection

Baroness Dido Harding, head of the UK's COVID-19 Test and Trace organisation and former CEO of TalkTalk, is set to lead the National Institute for Health Protection, the agency being created by the government to replace Public Health England.

The appointment appears to be a ringing endorsement of Harding's track record leading the contact-tracing programme, which launched a glitchy website without the promised phone app.

Harding, who was dubbed "Queen of Carnage" on The Register for her role in TalkTalk's 2015 mega-breach, went on to excel as the decision was taken to abandon the centralised COVID-19 contact-tracing smartphone app in favour of the distributed system proposed by Apple and Google in April.

www.theregister.com