One of the major international foreign currency exchange, Travelex has confirmed its suspension of some services after getting hit by malware on 31 December 2019.
This London based company is operating over 1,500 stores globally. The company said that it took systems offline “as a precautionary measure to protect its data”. And to stop the spread of malware.
The U.K website of the company is now offline and displays a “server error” page. The corporate site of the company says the site was offline while making “upgrades.”
In a tweet, Travelex said that it is “unable to perform transactions on the website or through the app.” Some of the stores are said to be processing customer requests manually.
The other companies, such as Tesco Bank has also suffered during the outage.
Unfortunately our on-line Travel Money service is currently unavailable due to IT issues at our partner, Travelex. In the meantime, you can still visit one of our in-store bureaux to collect or purchase your currency. Sorry for any inconvenience – Brogan
— Tesco Bank Help (@tescobankhelp) January 2, 2020
The company said that there is no customer data compromise to date. But it did not detail or give any evidence for the claim.
The company has failed in identifying the kind of malware used in the attack, calling an ongoing forensic investigation. In the previous year, many high profile companies have been frequently on target by ransomware. A data encrypting malware, ransomware will unscramble the data on paying a ransom to it. In March, ransomware hit Norsk Hydro, an aluminum manufacturing giant and the U.K. Police Federation. In April, Arizona Beverages & Aebi Schmidt, and in October, a shipping company, Pitney Bowes were hit by the ransomware.
Ransomware has also attacked various state and local governments. Last month, New Orleans reported a state of emergency when a ransomware hit its system.
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