An alleged cyberattack caused an outage to Tesco’s system

November 16, 2021
Tesco Outage Service Interruption Data Breach Cyberattack

Tesco, a multinational general merchandise retailer from the UK, recently suffered from a system outage that interrupted their business and disallowed customers from ordering or cancelling deliveries until the issue was sorted out. The retailer’s spokesperson revealed that a threat actor has tried to breach their system that caused it to malfunction.

With over 1.3 million weekly online orders from UK clients, Tesco stated that the attempted data breach had not impacted the personal details of all its customers. The retailer’s website and app were restored a day after; however, a virtual waiting room was temporarily executed to handle customers’ order backlogs during the outage. 

Back in 2016, Tesco was attacked by threat actors and stole £2.26m from 9,000 of its customers, which caused the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to fine Tesco Bank £16.4m for the damages. According to the FCA, Tesco’s debit card system design was found to have multiple flaws that could have contributed to the attack. An example is how Tesco Bank issues debit cards with sequential primary account numbers (PANs). Furthermore, the retail giant has also been accused of slow incident response during fraudulent transactions

 

During the website outageTesco grocery customers have criticised how the retail giant handled their online orders and cancellations. 

 

As reported by some customers, they were instructed to cancel their online orders at the early news of the outage; however, they were eventually informed that Tesco had lost access to their systems and could not do changes on any orders. Some customers tried to beat the cut-off time of cancelling their orders after placing new ones with other supermarkets. 

The FBI has recently advised the food and agriculture industry in the US about an upsurge in attacks on the sector, with threat actors aiming to disrupt the food supply chain. 

A cyberattack was reported to JBS, a meatpacking firm, that caused them to pay the threat actors a considerable amount of $11 million to gain back access to their encrypted data. Another cyber-attack incident happened to a Swedish grocery chain, Coop, after ransomware threat actors have compromised their managed IT service providers that disallowed them to accept card payments to their stores for three days. 

Last year, Tesco reissued more than 600,000 Clubcard cards when they discovered a security issue that enabled threat actors to exploit user credentials from other platforms to be used on its website to redeem vouchers. The incident links to a password-spraying technique wherein commonly used passwords are exploited for threat actors to gain access to other platforms and perform cybercrime. 

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