Cyber Attack On National Bank of Pakistan: Services Disrupted, Officials Claim No Data Loss

The National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) verified rumours of a hack but stated that no data seems to have been taken thus far.

“No customer or financial data has been compromised,” the bank declared in an official statement following the October 29 intrusion on its IT systems.

NBP told clients that their “financial data was not compromised and remained protected, safe, and secure.”

According to the State Bank of Pakistan, the NBP “reported a cybersecurity-related problem that is being examined.” Pakistan’s central bank said it is actively monitoring the situation to protect the country’s financial system’s safety. The SBP stated that “NBP has not detected any data breach or financial loss,” and that no other bank has reported such an occurrence.

The NBP described the hack as follows: “In the late hours of the 29th and early morning of the 30th of October, a cyber-attack on the NBP’s servers was identified, affecting some of its services.” The compromised systems were isolated as soon as possible.”

NBP’s employees, assisted by top professionals, tried to resolve the issue.

Later, the NBP stated that it had “confronted the threats and rectified the impacted areas of its systems.”

On November 1, 2021, the bank reopened full financial services, including ATMs and salary and pension payments.

It is unknown if the assault was caused by ransomware, a data breach, or a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).

Although NBP did not disclose the nature of the incident, however, the new national cyber security policy 2021 recently introduced by Pakistan’s Ministry of Information Technology has been effective so far in terms of incident disclosure, in this case, increasing awareness in the industry that cyber threats continue to evolve and no institution is immune to it.

Previously, hackers targeted Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) database. Minister Shaukat Tarin addressed the National Assembly that FBR websites were exposed to an average of 71,000 cyberattacks every month.

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