Dixons Carphone has been hit by a massive data breach involving 5.9 million payment cards and 1.2m personal data records.
The retailer has launched an investigation into the hack, but said there was no evidence of fraud as a result of the incident.
In a statement, it said: “Our investigation is ongoing and currently indicates that there was an attempt to compromise 5.9 million cards in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. However, 5.8m of these cards have chip and pin protection.
“The data accessed in respect of these cards contains neither pin codes, card verification values (CVV) nor any authentication data enabling cardholder identification or a purchase to be made.”
It added: “Approximately 105,000 non-EU-issued payment cards which do not have chip and pin protection have been compromised. As a precaution, we immediately notified the relevant card companies via our payment provider about all these cards, so that they could take the appropriate measures to protect customers. We have no evidence of any fraud on these cards as a result of this incident.”
Dixons Carphone also confirmed that 1.2m records containing non-financial personal data, such as names, addresses or e-mail addresses, had been accessed by hackers.
It said: “We have no evidence that this information has left our systems or has resulted in any fraud at this stage. We are contacting those whose non-financial personal data was accessed to inform them, to apologise, and to give them advice on any protective steps they should take.”
Commenting on the security breach, Dixons Carphone chief executive Alex Baldock said: “We are extremely disappointed and sorry for any upset this may cause.
“The protection of our data has to be at the heart of our business, and we’ve fallen short here. We’ve taken action to close off this unauthorised access and though we have currently no evidence of fraud as a result of these incidents, we are taking this extremely seriously.
“We are determined to put this right and are taking steps to do so. We promptly launched an investigation, engaged leading cyber-security experts, added extra security measures to our systems and will be communicating directly with those affected.
“Cyber-crime is a continual battle for business today and we are determined to tackle this fast-changing challenge.”
Last month, Dixons Carphone issued a profit warning for 2018/19 and announced it is planning to close 92 standalone Carphone Warehouse stores this year.
- In January this year, Carphone Warehouse was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Officer for a data breach after its computer systems were compromised in 2015.
