Details of millions of people compromised

Dixons Carphone has admitted a huge data breach. But where does this rank among other data breaches affecting UK consumers?

Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked on US President Donald Trump’s election campaign and has been linked to Brexit, from using its platform in March, days before a whistleblower claimed the company had harvested and stored data about more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission.

Uber admitted in November that 2.7 million people in the UK were affected by a 2016 security breach that compromised customers’ information, including names, email addresses and mobile phone numbers.

The Information Commissioner announced this week that it has fined Yahoo £250,000 over a cyber attack in November 2014 that affected more than 515,000 UK email accounts.

In May last year credit reference agency Equifax announced its data had been accessed by hackers in a cyber attack. Some 15.2 million UK client records were compromised, and Equifax initially wrote to 690,000 UK consumers who are likely to have had sensitive details stolen.

Telecoms company TalkTalk was issued with a £400,000 fine by the ICO in October 2016 for security failings that allowed a cyber attacker to access customer data “with ease”. The attacker accessed the personal data of 156,959 customers.

The WannaCry attack on the NHS in May last year saw data on infected computers encrypted and users issued with a ransom demand to unlock their devices.

The health service was forced to cancel almost 20,000 hospital appointments and operations as a result.

Payday lender Wonga warned in April last year that nearly a quarter of a million customers may have been affected by a data breach.

In November 2016 Tesco Bank was hit by a cyber attack forcing the company to repay £2.5 million of losses to 9,000 customers.