Security flaw at Monzo
UK challenger bank Monzo, has advised almost half a million customers to change their PIN numbers as a security flaw could have exposed 480,000 of them.
The bank has said that no fraud had been committed but had contacted the Information Commissioner’s Office “as a precaution”.
This came about because it had incorrectly stored the numbers in question and has advised affected customers to update their phone app and change their PIN.
Given that Monzo had only recently doubled its valuation to around £2bn, raising £113m in its latest fundraising round, this is obviously rather embarrassing.
Still, at the moment, no damage has been done and the bug appears to have been fixed. These things happen from time to time and Monzo is still young.
Still, competitors will no doubt point to this lapse in order to sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of either existing customers or potential customers.
The company has been raising money recently in order to grow its business in the US.
8chan offline
The second thing I wanted to mention today was 8chan, the Internet forum at the centre of the recent El Paso shootings, which has lost the cybersecurity services of San Francisco-based Cloudflare following the killings over the weekend.
This means that the Internet forum, which was also used in the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand earlier this year, was then vulnerable to attacks, which have since resulted in the site going offline.
8chan has become a destination for online nationalism and extremism since it was launched in the US in 2013.
The latest spate of shootings brings up the sensitive subject of gun control once again – but, sadly, I suspect that sales of weapons will go up sharply as a result of the latest attacks as there appears to be no real impetus for going in the opposite direction, certainly for this President.
