The London-based currency exchange firm Travelex are using pen and paper to serve thousands of customers after the company said cyber hackers were holding its systems through a ransomware, leading to a global blackout on its online currency exchange services.

A criminal investigation led by London’s Metropolitan Police is now also underway, to check its severity to public data.

The hackers demanded $ 6 million ransom and told that they had downloaded five gigabytes of sensitive customer data since gaining access to Travelex six months ago and intended to sell it if there was no response by Jan 14 for payment of ransom demanded.

Travelex is still changing money, but must do the calculations by hand, based on rates issued each morning from its headquarters. At a central London branch of Travelex on Thursday, its ATMs permitted withdrawals only in pounds and the screens that usually show the exchange rates offered for each currency were blank. This has caused huge losses to the company.

The Financial Conduct Authority, Britain’s markets regulator, said it was also in contact with the firm to ensure affected customers were being treated fairly. After the investigation affected persons would be given notification by the Travelex and the compensation if seeked under the law in force.

Importance of Perfectly blended cyber policy for a role of cost mitigator

Travelex is said to have cyber insurance but it probably won’t have enough with that amount of business lost. Even the US$ 6 million ransom demand may go beyond a company’s standard cyber policy limit of Travelex’s scale, which has total revenues of about US$ 1bn.

On top of lost business and the potential ransom payment, Travelex may also incur a substantial fine under Europe’s data protection rules.

As per the sources company may exhaust the limit of insurance available to mitigate the losses occurred due to cyber breach, some of the important losses incurred are Notification cost and ransom demand.

Therefore it is becomes very important to stitch the policy by analysing risk matrix of the company, which we Beacon insurance brokers duly take care of.