13 lakh cyber attacks hit Indian banks in 10 months; Who is behind them?

In February 2016, hackers targeted the central bank of Bangladesh and exploited vulnerabilities in SWIFT, a Brussels-based electronic network used by thousands of financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

Even as most transactions were blocked, hackers still managed to sweep out $101 million of the attempted $1 billion. This heist was a wake-up call for cyberattack risks to financial systems. Yet, seven years later, banks in India and around the world are now prone to much higher risks than ever before.

India’s financial sector faced more than 13 lakh cyber-attacks between January and October 2023. The Reserve Bank of India said in its report. This means that banks and non-banking financial institutions faced around 4,400 cyber-attacks every day this year.

Of these, vulnerable services alone accounted for over seven lakh attacks or 54 per cent.

Unauthorised network scanning accounted for 4.4 lakh or 33 per cent of all attacks. Passing on the virus code followed the list with 1.5 lakh or 11 per cent of all attacks.

Notably, vulnerable services not only allow entry into the intranet, but they can also allow malware to traverse a secured network in search of additional vulnerable services. This allows tampering of data and programs in the network.

The IT environment in financial institutions has undergone significant changes with the rise in remote working and digital services.

"Remote working has expanded the access points and internet exposures to internal systems. Adoption of cloud technologies in place of on-premises data centres and third-party dependencies has further added complexities to traditional security structures and aggravated data-leak exposures," the RBI noted.

Meanwhile, it is not only petty criminals or fraudsters who are carrying out such attacks. State-sponsored cyber-attacks have also come to light in recent years.

"The malicious actors behind these attacks include not only increasingly daring criminals — such as the Carbanak group, which targeted financial institutions to steal more than $1 billion during 2013-18 — but also states and state-sponsored attackers. North Korea, for example, has stolen some $2 billion from at least 38 countries in the past five years,” a report by the International Monetary Fund said.

Tune In