A consumer electronics retailer has confirmed a data breach attempt to compromise the details of 5.9 million payment cards. On 13 June, Dixons Carphone released a notice disclosing its investigation into an instance of unauthorized data access. The company came across the suspicious activity while reviewing its systems and data. Subsequently, it contacted security experts to help determine what happened.

When we began building a Cyber Risk Research team at UpGuard, we knew there were unavoidable risks. We would be finding and publishing reports on sensitive, exposed data in order to stanch the flow of such private information onto the public internet. It seemed likely the entities involved would not always be pleased, particularly as the majority of the exposures we discovered would be attributable to human error and/or internal process failures.