British Payday loan offering company Wonga has made it official that a data breach occurred on its database leaking critical info of more than 250,000 of its customers. The UK-based payday loan lender added that the stolen details could include addresses, names, bank account numbers, and sort codes.
Officials from Wonga said that around 245,000 customers from UK and 25,000 from Poland were affected by this data breach launched by some cyber crooks based in Asia. The info stolen includes last four digits of user’s bank cards which can be used for shopping and logging codes to online banking services.
London-based Wonga discovered about the cyber attack on Tuesday last week. But it chose to remain silent until its IT Staff come up with confirmed reports. On Friday evening of last week, the financial business began notifying its customers about the breach through a proper channel like email and text.
Wonga’s security team has confirmed that users’ loan accounts are secure and so no action is needed to be taken. But if the users suspect any unusual activity in recent past, they can contact the customer desk of the technology driven financial firm. Additionally, Wonga has also set up a help page on its website in this regard and is advising all its customers to kindly change their passwords.
FYI, Wonga is not the only UK based financial firm which suffered a major security breach in recent past. Tesco Bank, Lloyds, TalkTalk, and NHS were also victims of cyber attacks in recent past.
If we carefully dig into the stats of cyber attacks launched on British companies, the Wonga Breach is believed to be the one of the biggest involving financial information to have hit a UK company.
Wonga officials have informed the data breach news to Police and Information Commissioner Office on Saturday.
Note- In 2014, Wonga agreed to pay a compensation of more than 2.6 million pounds to over 45,000 customers who received fake threatening letters from law firms. Now also, the company is interested in coming up with an innovative method of compensation pretty soon.
