Paddy Power Security Breach Affects 649,000 Customers

Paddy Power,  the online bookmakers , are this week  in the process of contacting 649,055 people who may be affected by a data breach that happened in 2010. They say that no financial information or customer passwords were compromised in the incident and that  customers’ accounts are not at risk as a result. The full extent of the 2010 data breach only became known to the company in May 2014 and then it took legal action in Canada to retrieve the compromised data from an individual.

The stolen data from 2010 contained individual customer’s name, username, address, email address, phone contact number, date of birth and the extra security prompted question and answer.  Paddy Power say that they have not detected any suspicious activity to indicate that customers’ accounts have been adversely impacted in any way. They also say that  this incident has no impact on customers who opened accounts after 2010.

Customers are being advised to review other sites where they use the same prompted question and answer as a security measure and update where appropriate.

You may not currently be an active user of Paddy Power online – but that doesn’t mean you will  not be affected by this data breach.

Maybe it is time to think about making more use of prepaid debit cards for online transactions ? These cards have to be preloaded with money – and any fraudster who gats access to it will only have access to the balance on the card and not to the contents of your full bank account.  More here about Prepaid Cards in Ireland

Paddy Power say they did detect malicious activity in an attempted breach of its data security system in 2010. A detailed investigation was undertaken at the time and determined that no financial information or customer passwords had been put at risk. It was, however, suspected that some non-financial customer information may have been exposed and a full review of security systems was undertaken.

The Paddy Power Support Team can be contacted on:

Ireland – 1800 238 888

UK – 08000 565 275

Rest of World – +353 1 4040120