FBI warns Time Warner Cable of potential data breach

Time Warner Cable will soon be contacting approximately 320,000 of its customers whose accounts have likely been compromised, the company’s public relations director Eric Mangan told CSO Online.

They will be urged to change their passwords just in case.

The company was notified by the FBI about a possible compromise of their systems after agents discovered a cache of customer login credentials being sold online on underground forums.

The company is investigating how this might have happened, but for now they do not believe that TWC’s systems have been breached.

“The emails and passwords were likely previously stolen either through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through data breaches of other companies that stored TWC customer information, including email addresses,” Mangan pointed out.

So far it seems that no financial information about the users has been stolen.

The company indicated that most of the stolen credentials are associated with the Road Runner webmail service (email addresses ending in “@rr.com”), so if you have one, it might be a good idea not to wait for a notification but go and change the password immediately just to be sure.

Also, it seems that the FBI made similar disclosures to other services providers who have yet to be named.