Cyber attacks on banks not threat to customers

Legalbrief Today Issue 4812

The SA Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) on Friday confirmed local banks had been hit by a wave of cyber attacks, Fin24 reports. The wave of ransom-driven Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, targeting various services across multiple banks, started on Wednesday. A DDoS attack is an attempt by criminals to crash a website by overwhelming it with a flood of fake traffic or digital requests. 'These attacks started with a ransom note which was delivered via e-mail to both unattended as well as staff e-mail addresses, all of which were publicly available. Threat intelligence which has surfaced has revealed that this is a multi-jurisdictional attack with entities from several countries being targeted and should therefore not be viewed as a targeted attack on South African companies only.' As reported in Legalbrief Today, the City of Johannesburg was hit by a similar attack on Thursday night, with a group calling themselves the Shadow Kill Hackers demanding a ransom payment in bitcoin. The city shut down its website, e-services and billing system in reaction to the attack. 'We must emphasise that DDoS attacks like this one do not involve hacking or a data breach and therefore no customer data is at risk. It does however, involve increased traffic on networks necessary to access public facing services. This may cause minor disruptions,' Sabric said.

Full Fin24 report