Yahoo Finance 500,000 customers at risk: British Airways cops mega fine for data breach
Last year British Airways made headlines after hackers stole the credit card details of around 500,000 of the airline’s customers.
The site’s weak security meant that customers were diverted from the airline to a fake website, where hackers harvested customer details.
Those details could have been Aussie users’, with hackers attacking the site for a two-week period in June last year.
The proposed fine, $328 million, is the largest penalty yet under the European Union’s latest General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and it would equate to roughly 1.5 per cent of British Airways’ annual revenue.
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Until now, the biggest penalty was the $899,135 fine imposed on Facebook for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
"We are surprised and disappointed in this initial finding," British Airways CEO Alex Cruz said in a statement.
"British Airways responded quickly to a criminal act to steal customers' data.
“We have found no evidence of fraud [or] fraudulent activity on accounts linked to the theft.”
But a British Airways customer told the BBC he was notified that his card had been fraudulently used in an attempt to buy items at Harrods - and after finding out his credit card details could have been stolen by hackers attacking the airline, he knew the two were probably linked.
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