Ikea investigating data breach over cyber-security incident

Ikea are reportedly investigating a data breach over a cyber-security incident involving their jobs marketplace, known as TaskRabbit.

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is said to be aware of the incident.

Ikea has asked users of the app and website service that allows people to search for freelance workers for odd jobs like cleaning, gardening and furniture assembly, to change passwords ASAP. Anyone who may use the same password for other sites is also being told they should change passwords for other accounts as well.

As a result of the suspected data breach, their app and website service was temporarily shut down, and Ikea has said that any workers affected by the shutdown can be compensated appropriately. Ikea, who purchased the TaskRabbit app in 2017, said in a company statement: “We will update affected individuals as more information becomes available.”

Are you affected by the Ikea TaskRabbit data breach?

More information is needed about the extent of the reported data breach, and we expect that anyone who has been affected by the data breach will be duly notified by Ikea, as per the promise in their statement.  This latest data breach is one in a long line of data breaches for websites and apps for various retailers and business. It seems like we are always hearing about a new data breach, and the security of apps has been intensively questioned in light of the recent Facebook data breaches.

Will our data every be safe in the hands of third-party organisations? The issue with this question itself is that we, in reality, have little choice but to hand over vast amounts of personal and sensitive data to all sorts of organisations, and wherever we are and whoever we give the data to, it never seems to be fully secure.

We are now days away from the GDPR changes that will enforce far greater punishments for organisations who fail to deal with their data security accordingly. It will be interesting to see what happens to organisations who commit data breaches after the new changes come into force.

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