TalkTalk shows us the internet is only three clicks from anarchy

I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the personal data of four million users. But I feel I’m on the front line of the cyberwar nevertheless. In August, someone unknown to me tried to spend £1,200 at House of Fraser on my credit card account. The bank, to its credit, sniffed a fraud, rejected the transaction, cancelled the card and invited me to speak to a nice young man in India who talked me through the corrective procedure, including deleting a false email address inserted by the fraudster and setting up a new password to add extra security for future contacts.

A replacement card was dispatched but lost in the post, presumed stolen; after three weeks a second one reached me and service was restored — except that I stopped receiving monthly statements. When I eventually queried this, a nice young lady in India (who did not ask for my new password, I noticed) said, ‘But we’ve been sending them by email…’ and recited the fraudulent email address, which had somehow undeleted itself.