MANY MINDEDA charity bank is back online after ten days, with warnings attached
CAF Bank, owned by the Charities Aid Foundation and serving charity organisations, has restored its online banking service after more than ten days offline. It has also warned customers that there are likely to be further periods of unavailability, which it will try to keep outside business hours.
The sequence began on 21 July when the bank identified attempted fraudulent activity, followed on 25 July by related malicious activity of a different kind, aimed at removing a small number of individual online user logins. The bank traced the opening to a previously unknown vulnerability in the way some third-party software connects to its online banking portal. It says the core banking system was not affected and that money in accounts is secure, and that a small number of accounts were impacted. Monthly account charges of £5 have been waived for August and September 2026.
Ten days without online banking is an abstraction for most institutions and an operational emergency for a small charity, several of which raised concerns about paying staff and suppliers during the outage. Digital access to money is one of those services that is effectively free right up to the moment it stops, and the people with the least margin absorb the failure worst.
The vector is the recurring lesson: not the bank's own systems, but a connected third party's. The bank has not published a full incident report, and the number of affected accounts has not been disclosed.
Source: The Register