Safeway shoppers hit by e-mail hoax

A faulty email was sent to Safeway customers announcing a 25 % price increase in prices telling unhappy customers shop at rival stores.

August 13, 2000, 12:43 PM LONDON (Reuters) - Safeway has become the latest company to suffer an Internet security breach when customers were sent an e-mail appearing to come from the supermarket chain advising them to shop elsewhere. Up to 1,000 customers telephoned to complain on Saturday after a hacker appeared to have accessed a Safeway database containing details on 25,000 shoppers, The Sunday Times reported.

The hoax e-mail -- signed "from the Safeway team" and headed with the company's e-mail address -- announced a 25 percent price increase and told customers that if they were unhappy they should shop at rivals Tesco or Sainsbury, the newspaper said.

"The message does seem to have been sent out by our own computer system and we're trying to track the source," a Safeway spokesman told the newspaper. "We are investigating whether the computers may have been hacked from outside or whether there may be an internal source."

Not the first not the last

The e-mail is the latest incident to expose Internet security failures in Britain. Last month Barclays was forced to shut down its online banking service when it discovered that some customers were getting access to other accounts.

Electricity company PowerGen Plc admitted last month that the credit and debit card details of thousands of customers may have been accessed by an unauthorised user.

http://www.arabia.com/article/0,1690,Business|26900,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 13, 2000