The National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) has been hit with a cyberattack that crippled some of its services.
“The NBP has reported a cybersecurity-related incident which is being investigated,” said the State Bank of Pakistan. “NBP has not observed any data breach or financial loss. No other bank has reported any such incidence.”
The incident, which took place between October 29 and 30th, impacted NBP’s backend systems and affected servers used to interlink the bank’s branches, the backend infrastructure controlling the bank’s ATM network, and the bank’s mobile apps, the Record reported.
“Immediate steps were taken to isolate the affected systems,” NBP said in a statement regarding the cyberattack. The bank restored all banking services including ATMs and the disbursement of salaries and pensions on November 1, 2021.
NBP did not disclose whether it was ransomware, data breach or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The sources familiar with the investigation told the Record that the incident is being investigated as a sabotage attempt.