Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 25-10-2019

(Twitter: @FaizelPatel143)

The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (SABRIC) has confirmed that the banking industry has been hit by a wave of ransom driven Distributed Denial of Service attacks, targeting various public facing services across multiple banks.

Sabric says the attacks started with a ransom note which was delivered via email to both unattended as well as staff email addresses, all of which were publicly available.

It says 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.

SABRIC acting CEO, Susan Potgieter has emphasized 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. Robust defensive strategies have been invoked across the industry and we are confident that customer impact will be kept to a minimum.”

Potgieter says despite the banks preparedness and resilience they will continue to monitor this situation very closely and respond as required.