It seems that the misery of the customers who were impacted by the British Airways (BA) data breach has turned into a never-ending saga.
From last Saturday, reports are pouring in that all the BA customers are being blocked from online shopping by their respective banks in order to stop their bank accounts being raided by hackers.
Barclays, Santander, and Capital One have ordered new cards for customers whose details were stolen by hackers. They, however, issued a statement that all of the existing cards of the customers can still be used in shops and restaurants- but not online.
The news is out that those entire bank debit and credit cards which have been used by customers on BA mobile app and website for booking tickets since last 3 months have been blocked.
Santander said all existing cards of its respective customers will be functioning as normal until their replacements arrive.
Other banks such as NatWest, Nationwide, Lloyds, and HSBC have issued a press statement saying that they will block only those cards from online transactions if their customers find any suspicious activity in coming weeks.
As soon as this news of ‘Bank Blockage of Cards’ spread like wildfire, customers of the airliner started to backlash the company over the cyber attack on social media platforms like Twitter. Some even complained that the response from helplines was inadequate or extremely poor.
Security analysts say that British Airways could face a fine of £1 billion as per the latest GDPR laws which have kicked in on May 26th, 2018. However, a lot has to be accessed and analyzed by the law enforcement authorities before a fine is slapped against the UK’s largest airline service provider.
Note- On September 7th, 2018, the news was out that hackers gained access to the payment card info of more than 380,000 customers of British Airways. It’s said that cyber crooks gained access to info of customers who used BA.com and the mobile app of the airliner to book tickets between August 21st to September 5th of this year.
