LONDON (AP) – Phone and Internet service provider Talk Talk said Friday that it has received a ransom demand after a “significant and sustained” cyberattack that may have compromised customers’ credit card and banking details.
Chief Executive Dido Harding said the company did not know how much data was stolen in the attack on Talk Talk’s website, but it was operating on a worst-case scenario in which “all of our customers’ personal financial information has been accessed.”
She said she had “received a contact from someone purporting … to be the hacker, looking for money.”
Harding said she did not know whether the demand was genuine, or whether information on the company’s 4 million customers had been encrypted.
London’s Metropolitan Police said its cybercrime unit was investigating “an allegation of data theft from a telecommunications website” reported on Wednesday.