News of the Dixons hack comes the day after Yahoo‘s British arm was fined £250,000 for taking two years to tell half a million users that their personal information had been harvested by hackers.
Globally the personal data of 500million international customers was taken, including more than 515,000 in Britain during the breach in 2014.
But it took the web giant two years to publicly admit this – meaning that users of the popular email service were in the dark for years.
Last night, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) accused the company of failing to take ‘technical and organisational measures’ to protect the data of 515,121 customers.
Hackers have repeatedly targeted British companies to access customers’ data
It emerged last year that around 400,000 people in the UK may have had their information stolen following a cybersecurity breach at the credit monitoring firm Equifax.
The US company said an investigation had revealed that a file containing UK consumer information ‘may potentially have been accessed’.
The data included names, dates of birth, email addresses and telephone numbers, but not not addresses, passwords or financial information, the company said.
In 2016, TalkTalk was hit with a record £400,000 fine for the security failings that led to the company being hacked in October 2015.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said the attack ‘could have been prevented if TalkTalk had taken basic steps to protect customers’ information’.
More than 150,000 people of the internet service provider had personal information access, including sensitive financial data of more than 15,000 customers.