The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) warned on Friday that local banks are under sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, targeting “various public-facing services”.
The attacks began on Wednesday, 23 October, Sabric said in a statement.
“These attacks started with a ransom note that was delivered via e-mail to both unattended as well as staff e-mail addresses, all of which were publicly available,” the organisation said.
“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.
“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.”
‘Robust defensive strategies’
Sabric said “robust defensive strategies have been invoked across the industry and we are confident that customer impact will be kept to a minimum”.
“Despite our banks’ preparedness and resilience, we will continue to monitor this situation very closely and respond as required,” said acting CEO Susan Potgieter in the statement.
News of the DDoS incidents comes as South African Internet service providers, including Cool Ideas, reported in recent weeks that they had come under strain from similar attacks. — (c) 2019 NewsCentral Media