Travelex currency exchange suspends services after malware attack

The Travelex currency exchange has been forced offline following a malware attack launched on New Year’s Eve.

This week, the UK-based currency exchange Travelex announced that it has shut down its services as a “precautionary measure” following a malware attack.

The London-based company, which operates more than 1,500 stores globally, suffered the attack on December 31, 2019,

“Our investigation to date shows no indication that any personal or customer data has been compromised,” Travelex said in a statement published on Twitter. 

At the time of writing, the Travelex UK website shows server error.

The company is manually processing customer requests to ensure the continuity of its operations in its stores and immediately launched an

Travelex has launched an investigation into the cyber attack and hired third-party cybersecurity experts to lock out the malware. 

The company confirmed that no customer data has been compromised “to date,” but did not reveal the type of malware that infected its systems.

Experts speculate that a ransomware attack could be the root cause of the outage suffered by the currency exchange, the temporary shut down of the systems suggests that IT staff attempted to prevent the propagation of the malicious code within the corporate networks. 

The outage has a domino effect on other companies, such as Tesco Bank, Virgin Money Travel, and HSBC, that rely on Travelex to provide currency exchange services. 

A Travelex spokesperson would not comment on the incident, the company has apologized to customers and confirmed that it is working hard to restore its full services as soon as possible. 

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)

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