All those parents who made Wisepay payments between October 2nd and 5th of this month are hereby requested that they need to urgently change their passwords of the payment software service and keep a tab of bank statements atleast for the next six months.
Law enforcement authorities in UK are urging the parents of school pupils to do so as the Wisepay servers were hacked, and the company had to pull down its website and the software enabled app from the play store to avoid any untoward incident later.
Wisepay is actually an online service that allows people to make cashless payments in schools, colleges and other educational institutes. The service which is known from the past 7 years was down from Sunday citing maintenance issues. However, on Monday, the service hosting authorities clarified that the servers were down because of the cyber attack disallowing parents from topping up their kids’ lunches or with other items which the school sells.
Britain’s NCSC has been pressed into service to investigate the incident as the Wisepay authorities informed the cyber arm of GCHQ about the infiltration that could have taken place in the early hours of Saturday or Sunday.
Some schools have made it official that they are offering other payment methods for the parents to pay for their child’s meal.
Note– All these days we have seen news headlines about schools and educational institutes being cyber attacked by ransomware attacks. But now, hackers seem to have turned sadistic as they are seen negative impact the lives of children and their parents by compromising the payment systems.
