Having been crippled by a ransomware attack on New Year’s Eve, foreign exchange Travelex is now starting to recover some of its customer-facing services.
Travelex closed down its online services as a security precaution after discovering a ransomware program running in its systems. The virus was later revealed to be a strain of the Sodinokibi, or REvil, virus.
Not only did Travelex’s own customer find themselves unable to tap into the company’s web-based services, but the outage also crippled Samsung Pay, who was forced to suspend its international transfer services linked to Travelex.
Now, after almost two weeks of online service outage, the company has announced that it is making “good progress with its technology recovery” and that is has begun to customer-facing systems, beginning with the in-store systems that process customer orders electronically.
“We continue to make good progress with our recovery and have already completed a considerable amount in the background,” said Tony D’Souza, CEO of Travelex. “We are now at the point where we are able to start restoring functionality in our partner and customer services, and will be giving our partners additional detail on what that will look like during the course of this week.
“I would like to thank all our partners and customers for their patience and understanding while we work through the technical, commercial, legal, regulatory, law enforcement and other complexities of a global organisation that has experienced an attack. I also want to thank our 9,000 colleagues around the world who have worked tirelessly, during what has been a very testing time, to support our customers. We are confident, based on our efforts to date, that we will be able to restore our services and ensure the integrity and robustness of the network.”
Travelex did not offer a timeline as to when its online services would be back to normal.
The company claimed that has been able to honour most online orders for collection in store or, where it was not possible, Travelex has reached out to those customers where it was not possible to make alternative arrangements. It also said it had paid refunds to customers “where appropriate”.
Travelex is also in contact with relevant authorities, such as the National Cyber Security Centre, the Metropolitan Police and the Information Commissioner’s Office.
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