NPCI blames Cosmos Bank

A day after Cosmos Bank lodged a police case on hackers siphoning off Rs 94.42 crore, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) on Wednesday said malware-based attack on the affected bank’s IT system caused the fraud.

“Our systems are fully secure and this particular issue has occurred within the bank’s own IT environment,” the NPCI, an umbrella organization for all retail payments in India, said.

Bharat Panchal, Head Risk Management NPCI, said: “This has happened due to malware-based attack on bank’s IT system which has caused a fraud. Under the attack, maximum transactions have been reported from outside India. We wish to reiterate that our systems are fully secure and we are monitoring the situation continuously. We are there to support the bank in identifying the cause of this fraud.”

NPCI will continue to extend it's support to the affected bank in identifying the cause of this fraud, he said.

As much as Rs 94.42 crore were siphoned off from the Pune-headquartered Cosmos Bank by a group of hackers in a cyber attack spread over two days— Saturday and Monday.

The bank has registered an FIR with the Chaturshringi police station 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.

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