A Cyber Attack made on eve of the New Year 2020 on the database of Travelex Foreign Exchange is again hitting the news headlines – mainly due to the demands of hackers.
Reports are in that the hackers who encrypted the database are now demanding £4.6M ($6million) in Cryptocurrency for not releasing the 5GB data they hold to the web. It seems that before encrypting the database, the bad guys might have transmitted a portion or whole of the data to remote servers. And after releasing 2GB of data onto the web, the hackers are now threatening to release 5GB data related to Travelex Foreign Currency Transactions until a ransom is paid to them.
As the issue is yet to be resolved, major banks such as Lloyds and Virgin Money which depend on Travelex for Foreign exchange services are facing issues with customers.
However, Travelex has been consistently offering manual currency exchange service at all its branches since the ransomware attack and will be doing so until all its digital services are restored to normalcy.
Note 1- Travelex has emerged into one of the world’s largest currency dealers in the recent past and is serving a host of partners in London and across the world such as Sainsbury, Tesco, and HSBC. And it has officially divulged that it processes over 5,700 currency transactions per hour.
Note 2- The UK based company is yet to report the incident to the Information Commissioner Office (ICO). However, it has formally informed the details of the cyber incident to the National Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police which has initiated a joint investigation from January 5th, 2020.
