One of the UK’s housing association giants has suffered a serious data breach in recent days.
The Home Group has advised 4,000 of their tenants and stakeholders that their personal details could have been siphoned off by cyber criminals during the recent attack.
The housing association charity provides rental accommodation to 116,000 people across 55,000 properties in England and Scotland.
Customer names, addresses and contact information was accessed, but the housing association is confident that no financial information was taken during the breach.
The breach was identified and secured within 90 minutes of the initial discovery which was made by a third party cyber security expert.
Despite the response speed, the Home Group believe customers in England were particularly affected by the attack.
Chief Financial Officer, John Hudson, said:
“We were made aware of a potential data vulnerability and immediately responded to and resolved the issue.
“We have a robust incident response protocol in place to deal with situations such as this, which meant the vulnerability was identified and fixed extremely quickly.
“We have contacted all customers affected and I want to reassure all our customers that their information is secure and that we follow strict guidelines and protocols when it comes to data sharing and cybersecurity.”
Javvad Malik, Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4, said:
“It’s unclear at this moment how the company was breached, but it is encouraging to see the company was able to quickly respond to the breach, and inform its affected customers once notified by a third party.
“Similarly, while the company claimed to have resolved the issue within 90 minutes, that is still ample opportunity for records to be accessed and copied.”
