The folks at Travelex have issued a press release.
You won’t find any uncomfortable words like “hack” or “malware” or even “planned maintenance” in it, but you will learn that the world’s largest foreign exchange bureau “continues to make good progress with its technology recovery.”
Tony D’Souza, CEO of Travelex, said: “We continue to make good progress with our recovery and have already completed a considerable amount in the background. 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.”
Travelex will now start restoring customer-facing systems, beginning with those which enable the company to process customers’ order electronically within its partners’ and its own retail branch networks.
This follows the restoration of many of the internal capabilities necessary to support partner and customer services, which has been in progress since the beginning of last week.
The focus is to ensure the integrity and robustness of the network and therefore Travelex is bringing systems up in a controlled and secure manner.
So there you go, all good news then.
Travelex was hit by a ransomware attack on New Year’s Eve, knocking out its systems and preventing other banks including Barclays, HSBC, Sainsbury’s Bank, First Direct, and Virgin Money from offering online currency services ever since.
BBC Technology correspondent Rory-Cellan Jones put it rather well, I think:
This statement from Travelex- a firm whose services have now been offline for nearly two weeks- is in the best traditions of Pravda. “Tractor production continues to break records despite the machinations of saboteurs” pic.twitter.com/vY5YXuehRf
— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) January 13, 2020
