Amid frosty relations with Pakistan, a hacker from the neighboring country has attacked Canara Bank, one of India’s largest lenders.
On August 2, the hacker, who calls himself Faisal, defaced the bank’s site by inserting a malicious page and tried to block some of the bank’s e-payment services.
Within 24 hours of the attack, the Reserve Bank of India, in a letter marked ‘confidential’, advised bank chairmen to review funds lying in their bank’s (overseas) nostro accounts and carry out hourly reconciliation of payment emails by comparing outward messages with SWIFT confirmations.
SWIFT is the global financial messaging service banks use to move millions of dollars every day.
‘We have filed an FIR with the cyber crime department of the police. The bank immediately took note of the attack and isolated the server and diverted the traffic to a standby server,’ a senior Canara bank official told ET.
The hacker had used an URL to insert the page on bank’s site but could not access data.