Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Estonia are soon enabling offline debit card payments for at least seven days without network connectivity. The change covers payments for essential goods in physical trade, such as food, medicine, and fuel. Each country has made - or is in the process of making - the required changes to their related regulations to enable it.

The motivation for this change is to enable payments even in exceptional situations such as network disruptions due to sabotage or conflict. TL;DR: You can pay for essentials even if Russia cuts the cables.

Plans for this change were announced in May 2025: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nordics-estonia-plan-offline-card-payment-back-up-if-internet-cut-2025-05-07/

#resilience #preparedness #infrastructure #payments #banking

NEW: Booking says hackers accessed customers’ personal data, including names, emails, physical addresses, phone numbers, and booking details.

The company refused to say how many customers' were affected by this incident.

http://techcrunch.com/2026/04/13/booking-com-confirms-hackers-accessed-customers-data/

This whole thing is more than a little bit concerning.

Sharing for any of my friends who use Wordpress and its plugin marketplace.

https://anchor.host/someone-bought-30-wordpress-plugins-and-planted-a-backdoor-in-all-of-them/