Dutch telephone company Odid has admitted that a data breach affected millions of customers.
The company said in a statement Thursday that unidentified hackers gained access to its customer contact system and secretly downloaded large amounts of customer information. An Odid spokesperson told local Dutch media that the breach affected more than 6.2 million customers, about a third of the country’s population.
The stolen data includes the customer’s name, phone number, postal code and email address, date of birth, bank account number (IBAN), and details of the customer’s government-issued ID, such as passport or driver’s license number and expiration date.
The company said former customers who received service within the past two years may also be affected.
Odid said the data did not include customer call records, location data, billing information or image scans of government IDs. The company said this data does not affect business customers.
This breach affects customers of both Odido and its subsidiary Ben NL. The companies said their telephone, internet and television operations were not affected by the breach.
This is the latest in a series of data theft attacks targeting telecom and telecom giants in recent years, as government- and financially-motivated hackers continue to seek out sensitive information carriers hold about their customers.
Earlier this week, the Singapore government admitted that a group of Chinese-linked hackers had breached the country’s four largest mobile phone companies as part of a surveillance operation, but did not access customers’ personal information.
All the while, hackers associated with the Chinese-backed threat group known as Salt Typhoon have hacked hundreds of phone companies around the world, including in Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, as part of an ongoing espionage campaign aimed at spying on government officials and diplomats.
