Cyberattack hits National Bank of Pakistan, what can banks do to protect critical data?

According to the media, a destructive cyberattack hit The National Bank of Pakistan (NBP)  last Friday night, which seriously affected the bank’s ATM network and mobile apps. So far, the incident is believed to be caused by data deletion malware rather than ransomware.

On the night between Oct.29 and Oct.30, the malware hacked into the bank’s system affected its back-end systems, as well as the servers used to connect branches, the back-end infrastructure that controls the ATM network, and the bank’s mobile apps.

On Nov.2, a Pakistani security researcher shared a screenshot on Twitter, which showed one of the affected NBP systems failing to start due to a missing boot configuration file error.

Luckily, no funds were lost in the incident this time. According to the official announcement from NBP last Saturday, measures were taken immediately to isolate the affected systems, and ATM services and parts of the branches were expected to be restored within 2 days.

Viewing from other cyberattacks in the banking sector, things don't often go like this. It’s reported that nearly $100 million was stolen from Bangladesh’s central bank in February 2016. Shortly afterwards, Russian central bank officials also disclosed that more than $31 million was stolen from their central bank and commercial banks.

Cyberattacks aiming at banks have become commonplace nowadays, and data is usually the most vulnerable yet important asset that can be the “key” for hackers to place bombs, which links with the heart of business including service delivery, finance security and information security. That’s why data protection should always be kept in mind, or the consequences of data loss can be devastating sometimes.

What can banks do?

For banking sectors, it’s important to do regular security assessments of the IT infrastructure, and make sure strict access management policies of the core systems have been made to lessen the chance of being hacked by any kind of malware including ransomware.

But as we can tell from the news, cyberattacks are never 100% evitable when they really come. Therefore, to better prevent loss of critical data caused by malicious deletion or encryption, establishing a systematic DR (disaster recovery) plan beforehand is always the most useful solution among all. In order to do that, having frequent backups is necessary, and Vinchin Backup & Recovery can be able to automate and streamline the whole process, helping businesses to be prepared in advance.

Adapting to the data protection needs of banking sectors, Vinchin Backup & Recovery supports data backup via LAN-Free structure and separated backup network to shorten the backup windows and transfer data at high speed without affecting production network, and helps build a DR center by copying on-premises backups to remote sites. In case any cyberattack occurs in the primary data center, critical data are still highly recoverable with offsite backup copies.

In the coming new release of Vinchin Backup & Recovery v6.5, the unique Vinchin backup encryption technology will be available for true backup storage protection. When any kind of ransomware or malware tries to modify the backup data, the access will be directly denied by Vinchin backup system, enhancing the security level of backups.

Anti-cyberattack has become a top concern for banking sectors, if you too are having headaches on how to protect your most important digital assets, just know that you’re not alone, and making proper backup and disaster recovery plans ahead never goes wrong.