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.

See also:

Safeway scraps online shopping service

Food giant checks out of web-based trial  27 Nov 2001

Safeway is back online - but shopping's out

Safeway has relaunched its website, eight months after it was shut down following an embarrassing security breach.  19 Apr 2001

Safeway delays website relaunch

Supermarket chain Safeway has admitted that it is not ready to reactivate its website, and has refused to commit to a relaunch date because of security fears.  19 Oct 2000

Woolies forced to shut online store

High street veteran Woolworths has been forced to temporarily close its online store after customer credit card and personal details were exposed on its website.  11 Aug 2000

Barclays online bank suffers another blow

Barclays bank has suffered another embarrassing incident, calling the security of its online banking service into question yet again.  11 Aug 2000

Barclays' web bank suffers security breach

Barclays has reopened its online banking service after an embarrassing security breach forced it offline yesterday afternoon.  01 Aug 2000

Powergen customer info exposed in net blunder

Utility firm PowerGen admitted today that it had suffered a breach of internet security which resulted in the leak of bank and contact details of thousands of its customers.  19 Jul 2000

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