North Korean connection with Cosmos Bank Hacking? Know, everything that is important to know.
The hackers transferred over 94 crores to many foreign banks’ accounts by cyber attacking 112-year-old Pune’s Cosmos Cooperative Bank. Money was withdrawn from more than 12,000 ATMs in 28 countries between 3 pm and 10 pm on Saturdays. Apart from this, at the same time, hackers blew 2.5 million rupees through 2,800 transactions from different locations in India. Using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunication (SWIFT) facility on Monday, 13.5 million rupees were transferred to Hong Kong-based account.
Some experts believe that this is no ordinary matter of hacking. According to experts, North Korea’s infamous hacking group, Lazarus, may be behind it, which has done some major hacking in the world. This hacking group had leaked and destroyed Sony Pictures data. Apart from this, it had raised crores of rupees from the banks of Poland and Bangladesh.
What did hackers actually do?
According to payment experts, this fudge was executed through a firewall in the server’s firewall. Firewall authorizes ATM transactions only. After this, a proxy server was created and transactions were officially authorized with the same fakes or proxy server. This means that the ATM was checked without checking that the card was genuine, but instructions were issued to release the cash.
American intelligence agency FBI had already warned that cyber criminals are planning cyber-attacks through ‘ATM cash out’ fraud on global banks. In the ‘ATM Cash Out’ fraud, a bank or card payment processor is targeted, then unauthorized access to cash is taken out within a few hours.
International media had reported on FBI warning in Detail on Monday, but had already been foiled with Cosmos Bank.
Is the depositor’s capital safe?
1. The bank says that the money of the account holders is safe and will be safe in the future as hackers have used the proxy switch on the payment gateway and not on the core banking system.
2. The bank has appointed a professional forensic agency to investigate the cyber attack.
3. Bank server, Internet banking, mobile banking and ATM service have been suspended.
4. The bank said that it may take some time to start it again as the bank is in the process of making its system in full proof.
Cosmos chairman Milind Black said that the depositors will not have any effect. They said, ‘Our security system has not got a dent. In July 2018, the RBI inspected the bank’s IT system. The RBI has sent 4 officers to investigate and take stock of actual damage. Suhas Gokhale, MD of the bank, has sent an SMS to the account holders saying that there is no panic because the core banking system has not been attacked.
Inspector Vaishali Galande told “We have registered a case against unknown people under the IT Act.”
Black said that the bank has shut down its servers and all Internet banking applications since the cyber attack has caught hold. He said that the RBI had alerted the bank about suspicious transactions.
