People's Energy data breach: 358K accounts exposed
Severity: high · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2021-02-23
In December 2020, the UK power company People's Energy suffered a data breach. The breach exposed almost 7GB of files containing 359k unique email addresses along with names, phones numbers, physical addresses and dates of birth. The incident also included People's Energy staff email addresses and bcrypt password hashes (no customer passwords were exposed). Exposed data: dates of birth, email addresses, names, passwords, phone numbers, physical addresses. The breach dates from Dec 16, 2020; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on Feb 23, 2021.
What to do
- If you had a People's Energy account, change its password and the password of any other account that reused it.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
- Check whether your addresses are in this breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com.
- Expect targeted phishing that quotes the leaked details; verify any unexpected contact out of band.
Sources
All live incidents on Threat Watch
