KPN issues ‘2m apologies’ after cyberattack

Dutch telecoms company KPN has offered “two million apologies” in a national advertising campaign to pacify 2m subscribers who were unable to access emails on Friday and Saturday as it overhauled its systems following an earlier cyberattack.

The email shutdown is the latest blow for the former national telephone monopoly, which issued a profit warning in January due to falling market share and faces a competition inquiry over alleged price-fixing on mobile rates.

KPN suspended email access and reorganised its servers due to intrusions last month by unknown hackers who said they had downloaded about 16Gb of sensitive data from its servers. Technology websites in the Netherlands which claimed to have contact with the hackers said they had broken into the company’s systems through a core router running outdated software.

In an email to customers on Monday, Joost Farwerck, who was appointed Netherlands director for KPN on Thursday, acknowledged that maintenance on its IT systems had “not always been optimal”, and pledged to speed up investment in infrastructure and software.

The cyberattack is the latest in a string of negative incidents at the former state-owned telecoms company, which has struggled to find its footing for a decade after an over-ambitious expansion during the dotcom boom.

KPN has in the past year lost market share to competitors in the mobile sector due to what customers perceive to be high prices and inflexible service packages and it also faces competition from cable providers in fixed-line services.

Last year the company announced it would cut 10 per cent of its workforce and in January it announced profits had fallen by two-thirds year on year.

In December, agents from the Netherlands’ competition authority searched the offices of KPN and two competitors, T-Mobile and Vodafone, as part of an inquiry into alleged price-fixing in mobile rates.

The following month, the company’s chief financial officer, Carla Smits-Nusteling, resigned, citing strategic differences with new chief executive Eelco Blok.

“They have the wind against them at the moment,” said Frederic van Daele, an analyst at ABN Amro.

But Mr van Daele said the latest news was mainly “noise”, and that the key question remained the company’s ability to rebuild market share with mobile customers.

KPN shares appeared to have settled after falling last week due to the hacking incident. Shares were up 1 per cent to €7.83 in morning trading on the Amsterdam exchange, tracking a 0.9 per cent rise in the AEX index of shares.