A GARDA PROBE has been launched into the Fastway cyber attack which targeted the personal details of more than 400,000 parcel deliveries.

Fastway Couriers had informed the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner about the incident and the data watchdog has now commenced a probe.

The breach occurred on February 24 while the company was carrying out a maintenance update on a database server.

A garda spokesperson confirmed that investigators were now beginning to examine the data breach having been informed about the incident earlier today.

“An Garda Síochána have received a report in regards to an incident this morning, Friday, 12th of March, 2021. Enquiries into this incident are now underway,” he said.

Graham Doyle, Deputy Data Commissioner, has said that the body is continuing its examination of the breach.

“We have forwarded a series of questions to Fastway to determine what exactly took place. We are in the assessment phase and this will inform the course of our enquiry,” he said.

The leak involves names, addresses, email accounts and phone numbers of customers.

No financial information or passwords were exposed during the cyber attack of Fastway’s servers.

“Fastway has engaged an IT consultancy to conduct a review of the cyber-attack and this process is ongoing.

“Fastway has also notified the Data Protection Commissioner and An Garda Síochána and is assisting both in progressing their respective enquiries into this cyber-attack. In the interim, Fastway is engaging with its clients and their customers,” a Fastway spokesperson said today.

The company said on Thursday that the cyber-attack was identified by Fastway’s third-party IT development contractor on 25 February and was “fully mitigated” by 9am on 26 February.

“The third-party contractor advised Fastway of the breach on March 2. 

“The data that was compromised relates to the customers of Fastway clients. Names, addresses and contact details of 446,143 parcel receivers were compromised.

“The data compromised relates to Fastway deliveries, in-flight or undelivered parcels over a period of approximately 30 days from mid-January onwards,” the statement added. 

It is understood that the customers exposed to the breach were across multiple countries – Fastway have 16 depots across the island of Ireland.