In wake of Cloudflare bug, Starling advises customers to change passwords

UK challenger bank Starling is advising customers to change their passwords in the wake of a bug at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare which saw sensitive information from some firms leaked.

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In wake of Cloudflare bug, Starling advises customers to change passwords

Editorial

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

Cloudflare provides security protection against things such as DDoS attacks to more than four million websites by routing traffic through its network.

According to a blog, after a tip-off from Google the firm discovered a simple code bug which led to website passwords, cookies and authentication tokens posted online in plain text over a period of several months from September.

Several financial services firms, including Coinbase, Betterment, TransferWise, Prosper, are on a list of potential victims. One Cloudflare client, Starling, took to Twitter to tell customers that it is investigating.


However, the challenger bank tells Finextra it has been told it is "not one of the 150 companies at the centre of the investigation by Cloudflare". Nevertheless, it is advising customers to change passwords as a "precautionary measure".

TransferWise also says that it has done a "full investigation" and "we are confident that TransferWise customer data is safe".

The Cloudbleed bug meant that some visitors to affected sites saw unencrypted private data from previous visitors along the bottom of tens of thousands of pages a day.

Cloudflare has been working with search engines such as Google and Bing to remove cached data but says it has not seen any malicious use of the information.

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 

Aren't there legal and regulatory requirements to notify individuals whose information was compromised?

A Finextra member 

Not yet, the general data protection regulation enters into force in May 2018. Also passwords for banking teansactions will be mandated to be replaced by strong two factor authentication when the PSD 2 is in full force. One should not bank with a company that still offers static password to access onlone bank services.

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