Southern Water’s offer to Sussex customers after cyber attack 'not sufficient' following cyber attack

The water firm confirmed it suffered an ‘illegal intrusion’ after it was named on the cyber criminals’ site on January 22.

Southern Water provides essential water services across Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, with a customer base of around 4.7 million people.

It is believed that data including names, dates of birth, national insurance numbers, bank account details and reference numbers could have been stolen.

A spokesperson for Southern Water said it is currently working with independent cybersecurity experts to monitor the ‘dark web.’

In a recent statement released to its customers, Southern Water offered those affected ‘enhanced Experian credit monitoring, free of charge, for the next 12 months.’

But, Eleanor Coleman, solicitor and Head of the Data Breach department at JF Law has said that it is ‘not sufficient to compensate clients properly for this breach of information.’

Ms Coleman told Databreachclaims.org.uk: “We are aware that there has been a cyber attack on Southern Water, the latest in a long list of cyber attacks on various organisations and companies in the last year.

“We appreciate it is concerning for clients to find out that their personal and sensitive information has been subject to a cyber-attack, especially when it relates to financial and banking information.

“We also understand that it is difficult for clients to feel that they have any control over their personal information when these attacks occur; especially in the case of Southern Water where clients do not have a choice in water provider and cannot switch to a different organisation.

“We understand that Southern Water has offered Experian credit monitoring for 12 months, which we would recommend is a good option for clients to accept, but it is not sufficient to compensate clients properly for this breach of their information.”

The Southern Water statement says: “Since the incident, our IT security teams have worked with independent incident response experts, using enhanced monitoring and protection tools to check actively for any suspicious activity on our IT estate. Southern Water’s operations and services to customers have not been impacted.”