Money from bank’s 20,000 accounts hacked
Print Edition
THE banking arm of Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco was scrambling yesterday to deal with an online attack over the weekend on 40,000 customers’ accounts, 20,000 of which had money removed.
The hack is the first on a British bank known to have resulted in customers losing money, adding to growing concerns about the British financial sector’s vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, which have jumped in frequency over the past two years.
Tesco Bank, which manages 136,000 current accounts, stopped all online transactions while it worked to resume normal service, although customers could still use their bank cards in shops and to withdraw money from cash machines.
“Any financial loss that results from this fraudulent activity will be borne by the bank,” Tesco Bank’s Chief Executive Benny Higgins told BBC radio. “Customers are not at financial risk.”
“We think it would be relatively small amounts that have come out but we’re still working on that,” he said, adding that he expected the cost of refunding customers would be “a big number but not a huge number.”
The bank is a minnow in Britain’s retail banking market, with about 2 percent of current accounts, and represents only a small part of Tesco’s overall business.
It contributed 503 million pounds (US$623.4 million) to the group’s revenue of 24.4 billion pounds in the first half of its 2016-17 financial year.
But while the financial hit to the group may be limited, Tesco Bank risks serious reputational damage from an attack that affected 29 percent of its customer current accounts.
Other British banks have been targeted by cyber attacks in recent years, but the Financial Conduct Authority which regulates the sector said it was not aware of any previous incident in which customers had lost money.
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