Wonga Data Breach

Wonga have announced that 270,000 customer details may have been accessed in a data breach at Wonga, the Pay Day loan company. 245,000 UK customers could be affected.

What was taken?

Wonga says the data that parties unknown have accessed “may have included one or more of the following: name, e-mail address, home address, phone number, the last four digits of your card number (but not the whole number) and/or your bank account number and sort code.”

Advice?

To myself the advice on their incident page is a bit contradictory:

“We believe that your account is secure and you do not need to take any action.
However, if you are concerned then you may wish to change your Wonga.com password.”

I’d advise change your Wonga password at a minimum. They have not said the passwords were accessed, this is good. But I would check your bank statements a bit more closely, even for those small transactions. Question with your bank any that don’t add up. I’d change your passwords to other financial pages (certainly if you use the same password for multiple sites) if it has been 30 days since your last password change.

After Jermey Clarkson lost his money in this stunt: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7174760.stm I’d keep a very close eye on your transactions.

They posed the question:

“Can someone take money from my card with the information that may have been obtained?

• Full card details were not taken.”

Which is in my opinion is a very elusive and evasive answer to an important question.

Wonga official data breach page here: https://www.wonga.com/help/incident-faq