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British Airways£20M GDPR fine (2020)

Magecart-style skimmer on payment page — 429K records exposed

Penalty
£20M
Regulator
UK ICO
Jurisdiction
United Kingdom
Records affected
429K

What happened

Attackers injected a Magecart credit-card skimmer onto ba.com and the mobile app payment flow, exfiltrating cardholder + personal data of ~429K customers. The ICO's final penalty (reduced from an initial £183M proposed) cited insufficient security measures including missing MFA and weak network segmentation.

Root cause

What every team should do

  1. Enforce a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) on payment + checkout pages
  2. Subresource Integrity (SRI) hashes for every third-party script on cardholder-data pages
  3. MFA on EVERY remote-access account (not just admin) — and rotate via PAM
  4. PCI DSS v4.0.1 Req 6.4.3 + 11.6.1 now mandate this for all card-acceptance pages from Mar 2025
Source: ICO monetary penalty notice (Oct 16, 2020).
Would your controls have stopped this?

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