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. So the bad guy, if still at large, not only has my new account details but knows more about my actual spending over the past three months than I do myself, since I have no record of it.

Meanwhile, someone else unknown to me (am I paranoid in thinking it might be the same person?) seized my Facebook account, befriended a bunch of strangers on my behalf, and started sending out adverts for a well-known brand of sunglasses in my name. Meanwhile also, a 15-year-old youth in County Antrim is reported to have been arrested in connection with the TalkTalk incident — which provoked a £360 million fall in the company’s market value, despite its chief executive’s claim that the severity of the attack was ‘materially lower’ than first feared.