If you are a TalkTalk customer, I suspect you would probably be panicking about what’s been in the news over the last day or so.
I do try to steer people away from TalkTalk if I can, usually when they ask ‘whats a good ISP/broadband provider’. It’s a case of you get what you pay for.. and usually less than £2 a month for broadband brings up imagines of monkeys throwing stuff around.
Here’s some quick tips to recover your TalkTalk accounts, prevent more damage and hopefully protect yourself a bit more.
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Change your passwords.
You should do this immediately, if you use the same password on other sites change that too. Look into using a password generator (Lastpass generator) or manager (such as LastPass or Chrome’s builtin one). If you have forgotten your password or can’t change it, contact TalkTalk.
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Check your mail accounts for added users
Spammers may take advantage and either send malicious mail as your account name or account mailbox. Remove suspicious mailboxes and change passwords on your existing ones.
Check your mail filters and rules to make sure your incoming mail isn’t being forwarded elsewhere too.
The not too sure stuff
TalkTalk say there is a possibility that personal information such as Names, Addresses, Dates of Birth, Account information and payment information, but haven’t confirmed. Check the paying bank account as a precaution.
This has happened before a few times where information has been stolen and used in Phone scams such as ‘Microsoft Technical Support’ and PPI’s. Unfortunately there’s no way to track these down using withheld numbers, and most likely out of OFCOMM’s territory if they didn’t hide it.
From the looks of a quick glimpse at dumped data, it seems to be plain text rather than encrypted output. Encryption might have been applied but no good if the attack was inside the servers, or the encryption methods were also hit.
If this was the last straw, You can always check up on ISPReview’s Top Ten providers
For more updated information Watch the BBC’s article on the TalkTalk Attack
