Dutch phone company Odido has confirmed that a data breach has affected millions of its customers.
The company told a statement On Thursday, unknown hackers gained access to the customer communication system and secretly downloaded reams of customer information. said an Odido spokesperson local Dutch media that the breach affects more than 6.2 million customers, or about a third of the country’s population.
Stolen data includes customer names, phone numbers, postal and email addresses, dates of birth, bank account numbers (IBANs), and government-issued customer identification information such as passport or driver’s license numbers and expiration dates.
The company said former customers who had service in the past two years may also be affected.
Odido said the data did not include customer call records, location data, billing information or scans of government ID images. The data does not affect business customers, the company said.
The breach affects both Odido and its customers subsidiary Ben NL. Both companies said phone, internet and TV operations were unaffected by the breach.
It’s the latest in a string of data thefts targeting phone and telecom giants in recent years, as governments and financially motivated hackers continue to seek out highly confidential information the telcos have about their customers.
Earlier this week, Singapore’s government confirmed that a hacking group linked to China had previously breached four of the country’s top phone giants as part of a surveillance operation, but had not accessed personal customer information.
All the while, hackers linked to the Chinese-backed threat group known as Salt Typhoon have hacked hundreds of phone companies around the world, including in Canada, Norway, United Kingdomand the United States, as part of an ongoing espionage campaign aimed at spying on senior government officials and diplomats.
