In recent days Parents who made payments to UK schools via the Wisepay service have been warned their card details have been compromised. Wisepay said to his statement that a hack of its website meant an attacker was able to harvest payment details between 2 October and 5 October via a spoof page.
Attempted payments to about 300 schools have been affected by the scam, but the firm said that only a small number of the pupils’ parents would have used its system before it was taken offline.
The Company (Wisepay) managing director said that this was because the type of cashless payments made covering things like exam fees and school meals would not be done on a daily basis. “Actually, it’s quite a small subset of users of the platform,” insisted Richard Grazier.
Mr. Grazier said that “the attack occurred last Friday night and it was not noticed until the following Monday morning at 10:00 BST. At that point, Wisepay’s website was taken down”.
It had since come back online and was now safe to use. Bank details exposed in Black baud charities hack Black baud hack more UK universities confirm breach Mr. Grazier said the hacker had managed to find a “backdoor” into the system’s database and had modified one page.
As a result, when the users clicked to make a payment, they were redirected to an external page controlled by the attacker. This was “spoofed” to look like a legitimate payment page but anyone who entered their debit or credit card details was effectively sending them to the cyber-criminal.
Wisepay said it does not store any payment information itself and had not leaked any of its own records. But in a letter to schools, it recommended that parents who thought they might be affected should pause or cancel their bank cards, and change any online banking passwords.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said Wisepay had notified it of “a potential data breach and we will be making further inquiries”.
The company also said that it had contacted the police and had “engaged a computer forensics expert” whose work was ongoing.
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