British high street chain W.H. Smith announced today that the company’s data was stolen following a cyberattack.
In particular, the stationery and book chain company said current and former employee data, including names, addresses, dates of birth, and national insurance numbers, were accessed by threat actors. WH Smith added that he does not believe bank details were stolen during the attack.
In a media statement, the company said it “immediately launched an investigation upon becoming aware of the incident, engaged expert support services, and implemented an incident response plan that included notifying relevant authorities.”
According to security firm CEO Richard Hollis, risk crewthe fact that financial information has not been compromised does not reduce the severity of the breach.
“People cannot simply move or change their name after a data breach, so this information is in the hands of criminals forever. They can carry out scams or target victims with realistic phishing emails to steal even more information,” he said.
Erfan Shadabi, Cybersecurity Expert Comfort AGagreed with Crew’s point and added that retailers and e-commerce organizations should continue to operate under the premise that the environment is currently under attack and protect this sensitive data accordingly. rice field.
“Companies in these sectors apply data-centric protections to sensitive data in their ecosystem (PII, financial, transactional) as soon as it enters the environment, and protects the data while employees are working with it. We need to keep it protected,” Shadabi explains.
“Tokenizing PII or transactional data provides strong protection for that information while preserving the original data format, making it easier for business applications to support tokenized data within their workflows.”
The attack on WH Smith is the latest recent attack on a UK-based company, and we expect this trend to continue.a A recently published report by Digital Trust Insights suggests that a quarter of UK business leaders believe cyber threats will increase significantly this year.
Image credit: William Burton / Shutterstock.com
