Travelex Offline After Sodinokibi $3m Ransomware Attack.
MostCynical writes:
The Guardian is reporting that a cyber-attack forced currency exchange firm Travelex to take down all its global websites. Travelex is based in London, but is owned by Finablr, which is based the United Arab Emirates. Travelex operates in more than 70 countries with more than 1,200 branches and 1,000 ATMs worldwide.
The issue has forced banks who use Travelex's foreign exchange services to stop taking online orders for currency, affecting Sainsbury's Bank, Tesco Bank, Virgin Money and First Direct.
Travelex sites have been offline for a week, with the firm providing foreign exchange services manually in its branches.
The group's customer website carried a message to visitors that online services were down due to "planned maintenance". "The system will be back online shortly," the messages stated.
A message on its corporate website read: "This website is temporarily unavailable while we make upgrades to improve our service to you."
Travelex first revealed the New Year's Eve attack on 2 January, when it sought to assure that no customer data had yet been compromised. It has drafted in IT specialists and cybersecurity experts in an attempt to isolate the virus and get affected systems online, but has been unable to gain access and overthrow the hackers. The Metropolitan police is leading the investigation into the attack.
Tesco and Virgin money customers can process orders at Travelex bureaux directly (but are advised to get in touch with their local bureau first to check the availability of any particular currency.) Staff at the group's London headquarters have been told to return laptops before leaving the building. No word on how much the outage is costing the company, but the company has apparently been hit with demands for 2.3m ($3m )
Will they find the staff member who clicked on a link, or loaded a special app?
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