WH Smith Suffers a Data Breach

WH Smith a retailer chain from Britain  has revealed that it was hit by a cyber-attack that resulted in the theft of company data.

The stationery and book chain said current and former employee data was accessed by the threat actors, including names, addresses, dates of birth and national insurance numbers. WH Smith added that it does not believe banking details have been stolen during the attack.

As per the statement released – “Upon becoming aware of the incident, we immediately launched an investigation, engaged specialist support services and implemented our incident response plans, which included notifying the relevant authorities,”

No financial information has been compromised does not make the breach any less severe. Attackers can use this data to commit identity fraud and target victims with realist phishing emails in a bid to steal further information.

To thwart these types of attacks, Businesses need to apply data-centric protection to any sensitive data within their ecosystem (PII, financial, and transactional) as soon as it enters the environment and keep it protected even as employees work with that data

By tokenizing any PII or transactional data, they can strongly protect that information while preserving original data format, making it easier for business applications to support tokenized data within their workflows.