A data breach was reported by the City of Johannesburg on Thursday, 24 October 2019 which is said to have affected several of their customer-facing systems.
In a tweet posted after 11PM, the city said “The incident is currently being investigated by City of Joburg cyber security experts, who have taken immediate and appropriate action to reinforce security measures to mitigate any potential impacts. As a result, several customer-facing systems – including the city’s website, e-services, billing system – have been shut down as a precaution.”
It’s also believed that at least five banks were affected by technical issues which may have been caused by this attack on the City of Joburg. Standard Bank and Absa have since Tweeted that their issues were resolved.
On Friday 25 October 2019, the COJ reassured the public that they had high level technicians working around the clock to restore critical systems. Emergency calls were also diverted to the Provincial Call Centre (112) as the city’s call centre, website and eServices platforms remained offline.
The City also the statement that “Customers are advised to postpone any visits to regional customer service centres. Municipal account payments can be done via EFT and third-party payment service providers such as Checkers, Pick n Pay etc.”
As of today, Monday 28 October 2019, the COJ’s website is still unavailable and in a tweet they commented that “We are urging customers to pay their municipal accounts via eft and third-party payments.”
Read the full article here: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2019-10-25-city-of-joburg-banks-under-cyber-attack/
In a later report by Business Day on Friday, it was confirmed that the banking industry was also hit by a wave of ransom-driven attacks to bring down online services, but was not involved in a hack or data breach. On behalf of the South African Banking industry, SABRIC (the South African Banking Risk Information Centre) said the banks had suffered DDoS attacks, which render a site or online service unavailable by flooding it with fake traffic.
Business Day also reported: “The attacks started with a ransom note, which was delivered via e-mail to both unattended as well as staff e-mail addresses, all of which were publicly available.”
SABRIC commented that threat intelligence, which had surfaced, showed that this was 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.
“Because the attacks did not involve hacking or a data breach, customer data was not at risk”, added SABRIC, also saying that “The attacks did, however, involve increased traffic on networks necessary to access public facing services which may cause minor disruptions.”
Read full article here: https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2019-10-25-distributed-denial-of-service-attacks-on-banks-not-hacking-sabric-assures/