Virgin Media Hacked?

K3nnyb

Had a letter off Virgin media asking me to contact them to change my password on my account.

When I contacted them they told me my details and a lot of other customers details name, address,passwords etc had been accessed by a third party and they are investigating who it is but it isn't their fault.

Where do I stand regarding my data protection etc?

Thanks

CoolHotCold

OP.

Change the password, move on.


you are entitled to nothing, you have suffered no financial loss, and have not been a victim of fraud or anything that adversely affects you.

Furthermore, you can only obtain financial redress if Virgin Media were essentially negligent, either their processes or technology wasn't maintained to standards.


For DPA breachers, the ICO may investigate and fine them (even if no financial loss was caused to customers) because of the severity/negligence.

Nilrem

As coolthotcold says change the password, and you've not suffered any financial loss.

If you used the same password on any other site it's possible the breach it there (espeially if you signed up with your primary VM email address).
I think a few IT and ISP type companies are now keeping an eye out for details of their users appearing on various hacked lists, because people do re-use the same email/username and password combination repeatedly on different sites, and several big ISP's and IT companies have run into problems because of that and now take steps to try and catch it out (whilst also checking their own systems were not the sauce).
For example IIRC last year there was a hack of a forum that had a lot of people who used a certain software package as it was related to the software (but not run by the company that made the software), it turned out a lot of people also used the same login details for both the support site for the software and the software registration/purchase sites.

This doesn't include things like dummy web pages or infected PC's that might log users details when they go do certain sites.

In the name of full disclosure, I'm a VM customer and haven't received any such notification.