Powergen drama caps week of insecurity

The theme of the week is without doubt security.

First, after a weekend of spinning and leaking in Whitehall and Downing Street, the spinners and leakers hit on a brainwave. 'Let's blame technology,' they said, conjuring up images of nasty hackers and insecure email. (Actually, in keeping with tradition, they briefed journalists to that effect.)

On Monday, silicon.com learnt that a government-backed kitemark endorsing 'safe' websites was under fire for bias, and was therefore not quite the thing to calm the fears of would-be online shoppers. A worthy project suffering teething problems.

Today, and most alarmingly, a special investigation by our news team led to Powergen admitting to a massive security breach on its website - a hole that left the debit card details of thousands of customers open to a potential multimillion pound fraud.

The utility and the man who discovered the numbers disagree on how the details were obtained. But in a sense that's immaterial. The reality is that this news undermines much of the good work done to instil trust in online transactions.

This is a major public utility with millions of customers and a market capitalisation of about £3bn. The shockwaves will spread across the UK and beyond. Online retailers now have a massive job repairing the damage done and reassuring a public already short of confidence in the electronic world.