Great Western Railway asks users to reset passwords due to a security breach

The British train company Great Western Rail announced it has suffered a security breach that affected at least 1,000 accounts out of more than a million.

The company owned by the FirstGroup transport business runs trains between London, Penzance, and Worcester

Great Western Rail is urging affected customers to change the password used to access the GWR.com portal, it also informed the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.

Attackers used credential stuffing to access the accounts, this means that hackers attempted to access the accounts by using credentials leaked from other data breaches.

The company is now extending the incident response measure to other account holders.

“We have identified unauthorised automated attempts to access a small number of GWR.com accounts over the past week,” a spokesman told the BBC.

“While we were able to shut this activity down quickly and contact those affected, a small proportion of accounts were successfully accessed.”

“The success rate of the automated logins was extremely low, suggesting any passwords used were likely harvested elsewhere,”

In the following image is reported a data breach notification received by a customer.

The messages inform users that Great Western Rail has reset all GWR.com passwords as a precaution.

“To ensure the security of your personal information you will need to do this when you next log in to the GWR.com website.” reads the message.

“You should use a unique password for each of your accounts for security, and we recommend you review all of your accounts for maximum security, and we recommend you review all your online passwords and change any that are the same.”

If you are a Great Western Rail user change your password and change the password for each website where you used the same credentials.

As usual, let me suggest using a strong password and enable two-factor authentication when available.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Great Western Rail, hacking)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.