If you’re a frequent flyer of British Airways, or have recently booked with the airlines, you might want to consider cancelling your existing bank card and getting a new one. This is because according to reports, the company was recently hacked which resulted in 380,000 bank cards of customers being stolen as a result.The company’s CEO Álex Cruz has since publicly apologized for the issue and had promised that they will be compensating customers who have had their data and cards stolen as a result of this hack. Speaking during the BBC Radio 4 Today program, Cruz said, “We are 100% committed to compensate them, period. We are committed to working with any customer who may have been financially affected by this attack, and we will compensate them for any financial hardship that they may have suffered.”
He also adds, “At the moment, our number one purpose is contacting those customers that made those transactions to make sure they contact their credit card bank providers so they can follow their instructions on how to manage that breach of data.” Cruz would not go into details about the hack as the issue was still being investigated, but he claims that the hack wasn’t a breach of encryption, but rather a “sophisticated” effort by criminals.
According to a report from The Telegraph, an IT expert had apparently warned the company that they were vulnerable to an attack, but they chose not to heed their warnings. British Airways has since denied that they have received any such warning. That being said, new data protection laws in place could mean that the company could face a fine of up to £897 million if regulators find that they did not do enough to keep customer data safe.