In one of the biggest shocks to India’s financial map, a deadly ransomware assault on Wednesday affected around 200-300 of the country’s small and regional banks.
The salted attack mainly affected C-Edge Technologies—a supplier of banking solutions for these minibus-size financial institutions—and shut down their payment systems, as sources of Reuters revealed.
Even the NPCI, the micro-regulator that operates India’s retail payment system, quickly intervened to blunt the threat of C-Edge Technologies by limiting the firm’s connection to the NPCI payment network in an effort to prevent the malware from infecting other connected systems.
Thus, customers of the affected banks faced limitations in their choice of payment services, and a significant part of rural and cooperative banking in India remained disrupted.
There are approximately 1,500 cooperative and regional banks in India; however, these most definitely serve areas other than the large cities. This attack has affected a large part of this sector, and questions arise regarding the preparedness of this country’s rural banks in cybersecurity.
Central bankers, such as the RBI, are now conducting extensive reviews to determine the scale of the losses and organize steps to prevent future occurrences.
The affected banks were communicated with about the unavailability of payment services during the isolation period and the measures needed to protect the larger payment system.
Therefore, the affected banks contribute only a small fraction of about 0. They account for only 5 per cent of the total payment system transaction value, but the incident has depicted the crisis level of cybersecurity infrastructure in India’s diverse banking structure.
Thus, according to several specialists, it is important to address this problem as soon as possible to avoid significant economic losses and to restore the population’s trust in banks.
This attack highlights that there is a long way to go, especially for regional acquirers and merchants, and that the safeguard solutions and disaster preparations that are indispensable for the account and card hosting facility still have an extended way to advance.
