The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) says that the banking industry has been hit by a wave of ransom-driven Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Friday (25 October), Sabric said that the attacks have primarily focused on various public-facing services across multiple banks.<\/p>\n
“These 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 said.<\/p>\n
“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,”it said.<\/p>\n
Sabric said that these DDoS attacks do not involve hacking or a data breach and therefore no customer data is at risk.<\/p>\n
It does, however, involve increased traffic on networks necessary to access public-facing services. This may cause minor disruption, it said.<\/p>\n
It added that a number of defensive strategies have been invoked across the industry and that customer impact should be kept to a minimum.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite our Banks preparedness and resilience, we will continue to monitor this situation very closely and respond as required,\u201d says SABRIC acting CEO, Susan Potgieter.<\/p>\n