NBP says services resuming gradually after outage

KARACHI: National Bank of Pakistan (NBP) has restored services at most of its branches after facing disruptions for two consecutive days in the wake of a cyber attack, it said on Monday.

“Out of over 1,550 branches across Pakistan, around 60 percent of NBP branches are completely operational,” the bank’s spokesman said in a statement. “Over 900 branches were upped by today (Monday) evening…pensions, salaries and payments to the armed forces were made,” he added.

The main servers of the NBP were not harmed during the cyber attack, he explained. However, the spokesman said some of the ATMs slowed down due to networking issues. Services at the NBP, the country’s largest public sector bank, were hit by outages in a cyber attack that took place on late Friday and early morning on Saturday.

The outage affected the bank customers, making it difficult for them to access their accounts and other services. They were also unable to withdraw cash from the ATM machines. Fortunately, as the bank said, neither customer data was breached nor the funds were stolen from the customers’ accounts.

The origin of cyber attack cannot be traced as of now, the bank said. Technical experts would be able to guide on the origin of the attack after thorough investigations, the bank said adding that a final report on the incident would take around 15 days to be completed.

According to a State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) clarification, no bank, other than NBP, has faced a cyber attack. “Further, no financial loss or data breach has been observed so far,” it said in its official twitter handle.

NBP reported continuing successful operational recovery from the cyber attack on its systems. The bank also confirmed that more than 1,000 branches were operational on Monday and delivered regular banking services by processing 800,000 transactions of over Rs286 billion. The bank further said all ATMs were available for withdrawals by NBP clients with transactions of over Rs5 billion being reported by more than 200,000 clients.

“This is a significant achievement by Team NBP as the first day of the month is critical given the disbursement of salaries and pensions,” it said.

The bank said it was confident of returning to fully normalised operations over the rest of this week. Pakistani banks have been hit by a number of cyber attacks in recent years. The failure to stop these attacks has raised questions about the resources being allocated by the financial institutions to strengthen the cyber defence.

Analysts said the banks also needed to take action to address a systematic weakness in the IT infrastructures and the compliance systems, especially when central bank was eager to promote and develop payment and digital financial services in the country.

The NBP, in its annual report for 2020, said,” The whole area of technology has also posed material risks including those related to cyber security”. “The bank has to be automated and digitised to be able to meet the regulatory, reporting, and customer challenges of today. However, outdated infrastructure and software are major hindrances and the inability to onboard oversight expertise, whether at the board or committee levels, continues to slow down our progress in this regard in the face of ongoing external investigations of past technology related implementations,” the report added.