Vodafone Germany announced today that its servers were targeted by a hacker recently, which resulted in an illegal intrusion. The hacker was able to steal data of more than 2 million accounts. Data included names, date of birth, gender, bank account numbers, bank sort code and addresses. Vodafone says that despite the intrusion, customers’ credit card data, passwords, phone numbers and call data was not stolen. The carrier believes that this was an inside job and it has already alerted the authorities in Germany.
The carrier is now in the process of alerting customers that have been affected by this hack. Vodafone Germany advises affected customers to be wary against phishing attacks and even fake direct debit applications which can be sent to their banks, customers can reduce the risk of the latter by alerting their banks. Vodafone is going to provide affected individuals with an independent fraud protection service free of cost. Despite its claims that the intrusion could not have taken place without inside knowledge, the carrier says that only a fraction of its 36 million German customers have been affected, whereas those in other regions aren’t affected at all. Vodafone hasn’t mentioned exactly when the intrusion took place, it was apparently barred by German authorities from making any disclosures before the initial round of investigation had been completed.
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