Lloyds Bank reveals how IT bug exposed transaction data

News
Mar 27, 20262 mins

The bank is still investigating full details of a glitch that showed users of its mobile app transaction data belonging to other customers.

Lloyds Banking Group has identified the glitch that led to some of its customers being able to see details of other customers’ transactions on March 12.

It revealed the information in a letter to the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee, setting out the details of the incident and how it has been handled.

The issue arose after an overnight IT change meant that two customers who accessed their accounts simultaneously could have sight of each other’s accounts, it said. The bank said that fault was because of defect in “the design of the code used to update the Application Programme Interface (API) used by the app.” It didn’t go into any more detail about the precise nature of the defect.

The company stressed that at no point did any customer have full access to another account, and said it had not identified any loss suffered by any customer. It said it had notified all the relevant financial authorities, as well as the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates data privacy, and was fully co-operating with any further enquiries.

The bank said that of the 21.6 million users of its mobile app, 447,936 may have been presented with another user’s transactions, or had their transactions presented to another user, and of those 114,182 customers may have clicked to view details of a transaction during the incident and thus may have been presented with details of someone else’s transactions.

Maxwell Cooter

Maxwell began writing about technology in 1984, when mainframes ruled the world. Since then he has written for just about every business computing title in the UK, and for a few in the US, covering everything from Artificial intelligence to Zero-day exploits and all points in between. He has also been editor-in-chief of several award-winning titles, including Network Week, Techworld, and Cloud Pro, and a regular contributor to Whatsonstage.com. In his spare time he coaches a junior rugby team.

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