Why did I receive a Penalty Notice Email?
On the 1st of July 2019, two emails were sent out to all of our customers regarding a penalty notice. They appeared to be from us here at Handles4doors. After investigating what has happened our email provider confirmed that our email campaign account was hacked into. They were able to create two phishing emails and sent them out to all of our customers. We can confirm that these emails are not from us and are spam emails. We hugely apologise that you received these two emails and we kindly ask that you delete them and do not open any links.
What have we done about this?
We noticed straight away that these emails had been sent out. The first thing we did was go into our email campaign provider and change all passwords to stop anyone from gaining access, and reported the incident to the provider. They also began investigating straight away. We then reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They also began an investigation.
We were then inundated with telephone calls and emails regarding this and making us aware of the situation and also checking that no money was actually owed. The email campaign provider has since confirmed that someone on the 1st July gained access to the account by guessing credentials. We have since changed all of our passwords to all of our systems and followed many extra measures to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
What Impact will this Penalty Notice email have on my computer?
We can confirm that the individuals who gained access to our email campaigns were only able to see email addresses. We DO NOT store any addresses or bank details in this system. In fact, we do not store any BANK DETAILS anywhere in our company. Any hardcopy details from our customers are disposed of in the correct confidential way (invoices etc).
To this date (18/07/19) we have had no impact reported by anyone who received the emails. A few people tried to open the email links, (please don’t do this), but have reported that nothing happened to their computer.
If you would like to know more, please get in touch with us on 01252 786510 or customerservices@handles4doors.co.uk. And huge apologies again for any inconvenience caused.
