The personal data of 3.6 million people was offered for sale on the hacker forum at the end of January for 15,000 euros. The victims are customers of Allekabels Webshop, a Dutch company that sells cables for computers and smartphones, among other things. The Belgian section of the online store was also affected. It was not known how many Belgian victims were involved.
This includes a total of about 2.6 million unique email addresses associated with names, residential addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords. This makes this leak the largest data breach of passwords ever in the Netherlands.
A million other data is the personal data of people who have ordered something from Allekabels via a web store like Bol.com and Amazon. Email addresses or passwords were not leaked. Finally, around 109,000 IBANs were stolen and traded from clients.
The “advertisement” on the hacker forum for selling data was removed months ago. This indicates that all of the data has already been sold. Cyber criminals already extensively use the data to hack or defraud people.
Suspicious case
Allekabels has been aware of the data breach since February. After that, it turned out that there were about 5,000 “only” customer data and the employee had distributed the data, Allekabels reported. That person has since been fired.
However, according to RTL Nieuws, Allekabels knew at the time that their entire database had been leaked, not just a thousand data. The online store would only have known people who knew their data had been leaked on Allekabels. Konstantin Surin, Allekabels’ director of operations, claims the major breakthrough is “brand new” for the company.
what should be done?
If you create an account on Allekabels, it is best to change your password as soon as possible. If you also use the same password for your Facebook account or email, for example, it is best to change your password there. Finally, it is also important to remain very alert to fraudulent emails or phone calls from people who might want to deceive you.
