Estate agent Foxtons Group is under tremendous pressure after a daily newspaper named ‘publication i’ asserted that critical information pertaining to customers’ card and other personal details have been uploaded to a dak web site. As per the reports of publication i, on October 12 last year, a customer discovered card information, addresses, and personal messages belonging to over 16,000 individuals.
The breached data has been linked to consumers before 2010 but what's alarming is that nearly one-fifth of the cards are still active. In most of the cases, threat actors exhibit their haul to the clients by selling a small sample online, before selling privately. The size of the personal data published online is relatively small, however, the total number of clients that have been affected remains the most intriguing question.
Three weeks ago, Foxtons Group was notified of the published data by the client who discovered the same, however, it can be noted that the agency had not taken any measures to inform clients or the authorities yet.
As per the reports, in the last three months, leaked files have been viewed over 15,000 times. Estate agent Foxtons Group released a statement saying that its Alexander Hall mortgage broking business was hit by malware in October 2020 during a strike that affected many other firms.
“Some IT systems were affected for several days but were restored without significant disruption to customers. All necessary disclosures have been made and full details of the attack were provided to the FCA and ICO at the time. We are satisfied that the attack did not result in the loss of any data that could be damaging to customers and believe that the ICO and FCA are satisfied with our response”, Foxtons Group stated.
The CTO of Cortex Insight, Stephen Kapp stated that “it is safe to assume the worst, and Foxton customers should look to protect themselves from identity fraud and card fraud as a result of this breach. With both personal information and payment card information lost, Foxtons customers should take some time to validate payments and potential credit history interactions since October and flag anything suspicious to their bank”.