Dixons Carphone data breach, 5.9 million payment cards exposed

Retailer Dixons Carphone has disclosed a security breach that involved 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2 million personal data records.

Dixons Carphone discovered an “unauthorised access” to certain data held by the company, it promptly launched an investigation and hired an external firm to shed the light on the case.

The company immediately reported the hack to law enforcement, regulators at the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Financial Conduct Authority.

“As part of a review of our systems and data, we have determined that there has been unauthorised access to certain data held by the company.” reads the data breach notification published by the company.

“Our investigation is ongoing and currently indicates that there was an attempt to compromise 5.9 million cards in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. However, 5.8m of these cards have chip and pin protection. The data accessed in respect of these cards contains neither pin codes, card verification values (CVV) nor any authentication data enabling cardholder identification or a purchase to be made. “

The retailer explained that it has no evidence to date of any abuse of the data as result of the hack. The bad news for the customers is that the compromised information included payment card data.

Dixons Travel confirmed that hackers could have accessed data of 5.9 million cards stored in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. The company highlighted that 5.8 million of these cards have chip and PIN protection, in these case crooks may have accessed card data contains neither PIN codes, card verification values (CVV) nor any authentication data enabling cardholder identification or a purchase to be made.

Roughly 105,000 non-EU issued payment cards that do not use chip and PIN protection have been compromised.

Affected customers are anyway potentially exposed to phishing attacks and have to be vigilant.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs –Carphone Warehouse, data breach)

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