Safeway hit by hoax emailer

UK supermarket Safeway is investigating how a computer hacker gained access to its databases and sent a hoax message to thousands of customers.

A Safeway spokeswoman confirmed today that a hoax email was sent apparently via its email servers at around midnight Friday BST to "under 3000" customers who had signed up on the safeway.co.uk website to receive regular email information.

Safeway's website was offline this morning as it investigated the incident. The company stressed that no credit card or personal details, other than email addresses, had been breached.

Credit card details "wouldn't be there anyway because we don't do internet shopping", said the spokeswoman.

The crudely written hoax said that Safeway would be increasing prices by 25 per cent from today, although the date of 'Monday 13 August 2000' was wrong.

A vnunet.com reader who received the email on Friday night said: "I thought it was a bit of a laugh at first, but then I realised that someone had been into the site."

Safeway is the latest in a string of major organisations to suffer internet-related security breaches. Details of thousands of PowerGen customers were exposed on its website last month, and Barclays online banking service has suffered a number of security problems.