Data breach at BBC: 25,000 employees affected

A data breach involving more than 25,000 current and former BBC staff has led to concerns that members of the broadcaster’s pension scheme have had personal details exposed.

Names, addresses and national insurance numbers may have been compromised, leading the Corporation to launch an urgent investigation into the issue.

The staff affected were warned about the “data security incident” on Wednesday.

Bank details, telephone numbers, email addresses, user names and passwords and health information are not thought to have been leaked.

However, it is not thought that the breach is a ransomware attack, where criminals steal data before demanding payment for its return. There is no evidence that the files revealed have been misused.

The incident has been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s privacy regulator, and the Pensions Regulator.

A spokesperson for the BBC pension scheme urged members to be “vigilant” to any unusual activity or unsolicited and unexpected communications including letters, telephone calls, texts and emails containing suspicious links.

“We sincerely apologise to members affected by this and appreciate this will be concerning,” he added.

“We want to reassure members that the BBC has responded quickly and that the source of the incident has been secured. We are working at pace with specialist teams internally and externally to understand how this happened and to monitor the situation.”

They added that the source of the information had been identified and secured additional security measures have been put in place and the situation continues to be monitored.

Staff have been provided with two years of access to credit and web monitoring service Experian Identity Plus.

Earlier in May, the ICO revealed that reports of employee data breaches had increased by 41% in 2023, reaching a five-year high.

According to the ICO, there were 3,208 reports involving the security of employee data in 2023, up from 2,279 in 2022 and the highest number of incidents reported since it began publishing this data in 2019.

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