Cosmos Bank loses Rs 94.42 cr in cyber attack

In a first-of-its-kind incident, Rs 94.42 crore was siphoned off by a group of hackers from the Pune-headquartered Cosmos Bank in a cyber attack spread over two days.

The Cosmos Co-operative Bank Ltd registered a case on Tuesday with the Chaturshringi police station of Pune, which is investigating the case.

Initial investigations pointed out that the suspected malware attack has originated from Canada, Hong Kong and India.

At least 25 ATMs were used to swindle the money by the cyber attackers.

Officials of the Cosmos Bank and Pune Police said that the first attack took place August 11 (Saturday) between 3 pm and 10 pm and the second came on August 13 around 11.30 am, affecting the operations of the bank's headquarters on Ganeshkhind Road.

The case was registered under Section 43, 65, 66(C) and 66 (D) of the Information Technology Act and relevant sections of Indian Penal Code, officials said.

"We have appointed a professional forensic agency to investigate this malware attack. It will submit its report in the next few days regarding the modus operandi of this and the exact amount involved," Cosmos Bank chairman Milind Kale told reporters in Pune.

The attack took place on the debit card payment system. The bank came to know of it when it noticed repeated transactions taking place through ATM Visa and RuPay Card for nearly two hours.

However, as soon as it was noticed, the bank shut down its Visa and Rupay debit card payment system.

Kale said that the Core Banking System (CBS) receives debit card payment requests through "switching system".

During the malware attack, a proxy was created and all the fraudulent approvals were passed by the proxy switching system.

Kale pointed out that since the malware attack was on the switch system which is operative for the payment gateway of Visa/Rupay debit cards and not on the Cosmos Bank's CBS and the customers' accounts and their balances are not at all affected.

The savings, term deposits and recurring deposit accounts of the depositors are totally safe, Kale said and urged customers not to panic.