SA banks hit by ransom-driven cyber attacks
A number of banks have again been hit by a wave of ransom-driven Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks aimed at disrupting customer services.
A DDoS attack is an attempt by criminals to crash a website by overwhelming it with a flood of fake traffic or digital requests possibly crashing the system.
The South African Banking Risk Information Centre's acting CEO Susan Potgieter says this is not the same as being hacked.
"The banking industry and banks are not being hacked at the moment. What banks are being confronted with is a wave of ransom-driven Distributed Denial of Services attacks which effectively means they are experiencing increased traffic on their internet connections to their public services and of course this done with malicious intent with the hope of actually crashing those services."
Potgieter explains that the attackers send ransom notes to random email addresses before the attack, but assured customers that there was no risk of their data being released.
"South African bank customers can rest assured that the DDoS attacks they're dealing with at the moment are not aimed at compromising customer data at all and there is, at this point in time, absolutely no risk of customer data being out in the wild.
"The threat is that if banks can't keep their services up there might be reputation risks to them and the inconvenience to customers might annoy customer."
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This comes after the hacking of City of Johannesburg's website. Klopper adds that the attack on the system could have dire consequences for customers. "In practical terms, obviously the worst that could happen is the client's information is out there, in the market, in cyberspace.