The South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) has warned that local banks are under sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, targeting “various public-facing services”.
The attacks began on Wednesday, 23 October, Sabric said in a statement.
“These attacks started with a ransom note that was delivered via e-mail to both unattended as well as staff e-mail addresses, all of which were publicly available,” the organisation said.
“Threat intelligence which has surfaced has revealed that this is a multi-jurisdictional attack with entities from several countries being targeted and should therefore not be viewed as a targeted attack on South African companies only,” Sabric said.
“We must emphasise that DDoS attacks like this one do not involve hacking or a data breach and therefore no customer data is at risk. It does, however, involve increased traffic on networks necessary to access public-facing services. This may cause minor disruptions.”
South Africa has the third-highest number of cyber-crime victims worldwide, losing about R2.2 billion a year to cyber-attacks.
Meanwhile City of Joburg was forced to shut their network after it was hacked, leaving millions of Joburgers unable to pay their bills, query them or even make inquiries about their water and electricity consumption.
The City has detected a network breach in its systems ^TK pic.twitter.com/r43iiJiUya
— City of Joburg (@CityofJoburgZA) October 24, 2019