Regime urged to manage more on Cyber Crime: Talk Talk Telecom

A leading business group has pressed the government to get more action on cybercrime after hackers seized the personal data and bank details of up to 4 million TalkTalk customers.

Constabulary are looking into a ransom demand sent to the telecoms company after its main executive, Dido Harding, said a person claiming to be the hacker had contacted her immediately and demanded money in exchange for the information.

Oliver Parry, the Institute of Directors’ senior corporate governance adviser, told the BBC that police should make cybercrime an urgent priority, but added that societies “are ultimately responsible for protecting their customers’ data”.

There have been doubts around how well TalkTalk secured its customers’ data after Harding admitted she did not know whether details, including names, addresses and bank account numbers were inscribed. It was the company’s third major data breach in the past yr.

Parry said: “The risks need to be reviewed regularly by the panel of directors, who must assure they recognize where the likely threats are coming from and are devised in case the worst comes about.

Professor Mark Skilton, an IT consultant and academic at Warwick Business School, said: “Large-scale data theft is increasingly large business for professional cyber criminals.

“The value of personal identity data records and news report details is increasingly high as it can be used in masquerading identity to commit theft of other data; or grant direct access to personal bank account money and fraudulent transactions.”

Proof of adequate cyber security could be made a term of government contracts, said Hazel Blears, the former MP who has been counterterrorism minister and a member of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

“The time is quickly drawing near when we have grown to have a debate in this country about do we expect companies who are taking massive amounts of public data to be able to demonstrate that they are putting in place the necessary security precautions... about whether there needs to be a better regulatory framework,” Blears told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. “We could manage it through a code, we could manage it through government contracting. We have set out our critical national infrastructure to protect – power, water, all of those things that are vital to the nation. We could say to companies: we are not starting to undertake with you unless we are perfectly sure that you have selected the necessary measures.”