Liberty is warning its customers to resist phishing attempts in the wake of a ransomware attack that has potentially compromised the data of millions of insurance clients.
The company has sent a message to customers, urging them to be vigilant in protecting their data.
“Liberty will not send you an e-mail or link for you to change any of your passwords,” it states.
“It is always good practice to ensure you select strong passwords and change them on a regular basis.”
On Saturday evening the insurance giant announced that it had been the subject of what it calls “illegal and unauthorised access to its IT infrastructure”.
Since then it has emerged that mostly email and attachments have been compromised. Liberty hasn’t yet quantified the extent of the breach, but it is believed that it hasn’t paid a ransom.
Matt Boddy, security specialist at Sophos, agrees that not paying a ransom to keep leaked data from being released is the sensible course of action.
“After all, there’s no guarantee that the crooks wouldn’t leak the data anyway, or sell om it to other crooks, or come back with bigger demands next month.
“In fact, now the crooks have this data, what if they get hacked in turn and the data stolen by someone else – the ‘pay for silence’ game could go on forever,” he says.
“This isn’t like a ransomware attack where crooks demand money to get your computer system running again. We recommend not paying ransomware demands, but at least if you do you can tell pretty quickly whether the data unscrambling tool you bought worked or not – you’re essentially ‘paying for a positive’.
“In an extortion attack of the sort against Liberty, you’re ‘paying for a negative’, essentially trusting the crooks for ever more.”
The good news, says Boddy, is that Liberty is being upfront about the attack, trying to find out just how much the crooks got hold of in order to make sure an attack of this sort doesn’t happen again.
“So, if you’re a Liberty customer, watch out for future news from the company about this breach; keep an eye on your bank statements; and, as, always, be vigilant about emails, phone calls and text messages that offer to ‘help you recover’ from this security incident.
“If you need to contact Liberty about this incident, please don’t rely on phone numbers, email addresses or websites that arrive in messages offering to help – those messages could come from anyone.”