Tesco supermarket chain, the UK’s largest, was hit by a cyber attack and had two days without online customer service – Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th October. The outage, which left customers struggling to buy groceries or track orders, began Saturday morning and continued through Sunday. The site went down after Tesco reported on Twitter attempts to “interfere with our systems”.
The problem is already fixed according to UK media. A spokesperson said: “Our website and online grocery app are now up and running again. Our teams worked non-stop to restore service and we are very sorry to our customers for the inconvenience caused.”
According to Down Detector, which tracks users reporting problems with websites, the problem peaked on Sunday morning when more than 1,500 people said the site was not working.
This is not the first time Tesco has come under attack. A breach in 2014 led the company to deactivate accounts after attackers shared more than 2,000 user login details. In 2016, an attack on Tesco Bank’s card system, controlled by the company, caused a loss of 2.26 million pounds: the problem is that debit cards had poor security and a “series of errors” according to the portal ZDNet.
Tesco has around 4,000 stores and a product line that focuses on price rather than quality. Its larger hypermarket format is called Tesco Extra, while downtown stores are called Tesco Metro or Tesco Express. Sainsbury’s is Tesco’s biggest competitor, with more than 2,000 stores according to Google.
Source: CisoAdvisor
