The payments industry deplores it, but cash is starting to look pretty good, and central banks agree: “We do not foresee a totally cashless society”: ECB
This has not been a good year for IT systems in the UK. First there was TSB Bank’s botched IT migration in April, which resulted in millions of customers being blocked from their online accounts. The problems at the bank continue to fester even to this day, 22 weeks later. Then there was the Visa outage in June, which caused chaos across much of Western Europe, but particularly in the UK where consumers are far more reliant on contactless Visa cards. And now there’s British Airways and Lloyds Banking Group.
On Thursday, British Airways announced that up to 380,000 card payments on both its website and app had been compromised during a 15-day data breach. BA says the breach affected bookings made between 10.58 pm on August 21 and 9.45 pm on September 5. The compromised data included the personal and financial details of the passengers that booked during that period.
BA says it was not a breach of the airline’s encryption. “There were other methods, very sophisticated efforts, by criminals in obtaining our data,” BA’s chief executive, Álex Cruz, said.
Some customers have complained of having to cancel cards as a result of the breach while others are considering changing their online passwords. BA launched a massive charm offensive assuring customers who lose out financially that they will be compensated. That didn’t stop the shares of BA’s Anglo-Spanish multinational holding company, International Consolidated Airlines Group, S.A., from falling 5% between Thursday and Friday.
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