British Airways (BA), the internationally acclaimed airliner, seems to intend to offer £3 billion compensation to all customers who were impacted by the data breach of 2018. Highly placed sources say that the legal negotiations will take place on this note in the 1Q of 2021, and the company that offers air travel services is likely to acknowledge its inability to protect the information of its customers by paying them the compensation they deserve.
Although the exact payout details are yet to be churned out, the legally appointed steering committee working on the compensation stated that each impacted customer will apparently get £6,000 as compensation( total £3b) for loosing their personal details in the 2018 British Airways Cyber Attack.
To those uninitiated, the customers using the services of BA were deeply impacted when their personal information was accessed by hackers in two data breach events. One was between April and July 2018 when the cyber crooks accessed around 186,000 financial details of customers who booked details through the BA website. And the second instance of personal information and financial details were compromised via the app that impacted over 380,000 users between Aug-Sept’18.
Cybersecurity Insiders learnt from its scribes that details such as customer names, billing details, CVV numbers, payment card details, expiry dates, and email addresses were accessed by hackers, albeit passport details.
Citing the impact on customers from the data breach, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) levied a penalty of £183 million on the company for the breach. But as the airliner was facing severe losses because of the global air services shut down, the penalty was reduced to £20m in Oct’20.
British Airways is yet to respond to the latest speculation about doing rounds in the media. But a spokesperson assured that the England-based firm knows how to defend itself in such a situation of litigation.
