“Tesco Bank, owned by Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco, halted all online transactions on Monday after money was stolen from 20,000 accounts in the country’s first such cyber heist.

The bank, which manages 136,000 current accounts, did not explain how the thefts had happened but said it would repay people who had lost money in the online bank heist, which targeted 40,000 accounts in all and fuelled fears about the British financial sector’s vulnerability.

Tesco Bank’s Chief Executive Benny Higgins told the BBC he thought “relatively small amounts” had been stolen, but the bank declined to give details of how much money in total had been taken or if it knew how the thefts had transpired.”

This is a huge cyber attack and clearly well planned. The heist occurred over the weekend when Tesco would have less staff working and so far out of the 40,000 accounts targeted, 20,000 had money stolen from them. The amounts being reported as stolen vary from a few hundred pounds to thousands of pounds. I hope Tesco release a statement providing more information on this heist and more importantly make sure this doesn’t happen again. This is a worrying saga following other cyber attacks on banks.

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