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Time Warner Cable customer emails and passwords possibly compromised

Time Warner Cable customer emails and passwords possibly compromised

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Time Warner Cable confirmed with Reuters yesterday that a small percentage of its customers, but at least 320,000, might have been impacted in a data breach. The company didn't provide details on how long ago the account information was stolen or when it found out about the breach. It did say, however, the data was released as a result of either phishing attacks or a data breach of a separate company that also stored this email data. Time Warner says its systems weren’t directly breached, and that it only found out about the incident after the FBI told them it believed some email addresses and passwords were compromised.

Possible victims will be receiving notification letters and emails directly and should change their passwords. The number of impacted customers is only a small portion of Time Warner’s customer base. The New York Times reported in 2014 that Time Warner had 11.4 million residential and business customers; this breach would impact around 3 percent of them. Time Warner confirmed with The Verge that it has no evidence to indicate its systems or processes were impacted and that it is proactively reaching out to potentially affected customers.

Update, 1/8/15, 1:36 PM: We updated to account for Time Warner's comment.