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ARTICLE · 14 AUGUST 2019

Corporate Blackmail: One Way In Which Victims Can Take Back Control

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The cost of being a victim of crime? An extraordinary £77million, according to TalkTalk at the recent sentencing of one of the individuals who hacked their systems

United KingdomPrivacy
Jo Sanders
Jo Sanders
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The cost of being a victim of crime? An extraordinary £77million, according to TalkTalk at the recent sentencing of one of the individuals who hacked their systems and blackmailed six senior executives.

Baroness Harding of Winscombe (then TalkTalk Chief Executive) and others received blackmail threats demanding payment in Bitcoin or customer data would be sold on the dark web. The TalkTalk data breach continues to be in the news, with recent revelations that customer data hacked in 2015 remains available online.

The modus operandi of the corporate blackmailer is to obtain information – sometimes as simple as email addresses and perhaps credit card details of business customers – and threaten the company that they will be released publicly knowing that will risk the ruin of the company’s reputation and result in significant costs. It is important to realise that in contrast to blackmails of many high-profile individuals, the stolen information may not reveal any

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