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By Dan Ilett, 5 August 2005 13:30

NEWS Electronic payments service Moneybookers has bolstered its security by moving back-up severs to a hosting facility located in an ex-nuclear bunker in the UK.

Moneybookers sells email transaction services and acts as a guarantor in a similar way to PayPal. Most of its business is in payment services to merchants, and the value of transactions can be high.

To improve security, the company moved its resilience hardware to The Bunker, an electromagnetic pulse-proof data centre based in a former-RAF and NATO building.

The Kent-based hosting company claims its IT infrastructure was designed by cryptologists and it has its own connection to the national grid.

Daniel Klein, managing director of Moneybookers, said: "The main reason for this was for security. Our service is similar to a bank's where we manage deposits. [This place] was formally a nuclear bunker so it shouldn't be a terrorist target.

"We have two hosting facilities. The Bunker is one of the most secure places in England where you could keep servers. Security is paramount to our customers."

Although Moneybookers manages its own equipment, other Bunker financial services customers use its managed hosting service. The data centre infrastrucure is built entirely on open source software and has no firewalls in place.

A spokesman for The Bunker said: "We don't use [firewalls] because open source is already secure. Some customers do have requirements for them, so we put open source firewalls in. But, by and large, the majority of customers do not need firewalls. That's the big difference between open source and the Windows world."