Barclays suffers online security breach
Barclays has reopened its online banking service after an embarrassing security breach forced it offline yesterday afternoon.
The shutdown of one of the UK’s biggest internet banking services happened after four of the bank’s customers reported that they were able to see other customers’ account details. The discovery of the problem followed a software upgrade carried out on Saturday.
However, the bank has sought to reassure customers by insisting that despite being able to see these details, it would not have been possible to carry out transactions using those accounts.
The site was offline from 3.30pm yesterday until 7pm, when the service reopened using the older software. The upgraded software, which was designed to improve transaction processing, is now under review.
Barclays has 1.25 million online customers, some 85,000 of whom used the service between the time of the upgrade and the suspension. A spokeswoman for the bank said: ‘The security of our customers is paramount. We reinstated online banking using the old service. We will not re-release the upgrade until we’re satisfied problems are rectified.’
She added that no customers had lost money because of the incident, and that the bank has launched an investigation to determine the root cause of the software problem.
The Barclays glitch comes just days after energy company Powergen admitted that thousands of its customer account details were exposed on its website.
This article first appeared on vnunet.com