Global telecommunications company Telefónica rethought the way it looked at IT security after the cyberattack that hit UK telecommunications provider TalkTalk back in October 2015, according to Telefónica’s global chief information officer (CIO), Phil Jordan.
The data breach exposed the personal details of more than 150,000 customers and led to a record fine in the UK of £400,000 ($486,720) by the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). TalkTalk, which provides pay TV, internet access and mobile network services to enterprises and consumers in the UK revealed the attack led to the loss of more than 100,000 customers and cost more than forty million pounds ($49M) to repair.
Telefónica, which also trades as O2 in the UK, Vivo in Brazil and Movistar in South America and Spain, is one of the largest telecoms companies in the world.
So when another telecommunications company like TalkTalk was hit by a cyberattack, it made Telefónica revisit how it dealt with information security.
“There’s no doubt [that the TalkTalk data breach] caught everybody’s attention and it raised awareness – particularly in the UK and in our UK brand O2,” says Jordan.
“We ended up going through another full review off the back of TalkTalk to ensure that we were where we needed to be,” he adds.
The data breach has shifted security at Telefónica from being ‘important’ to ‘urgently important’, according to Jordan.
Forbes |
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