The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has asked all the banks to be careful against the cyber attacks and take stringent actions to curb its menace. The advisory note from the payments body comes in the wake of the cyber attack that took place in Cosmos Cooperative Bank between August 11 and August 13, where criminals used counterfeit cards to withdraw funds across the world in a ‘cash out’ attack.
NPCI pointed out that in the cyberfraud carried out at Cosmos Cooperative Bank, the malware had apparently installed a ‘ghost-switch functionality’ that authenticates and authorises fraudulent transactions without sending an alert to the bank’s servers. The payment body will be conducting an audit to analyse bank’s IT environment to ascertain how the fraud had occurred.
Explaining the significance of cybersecurity in this era of technological advancement, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Urjit Patel said in his recent speech, “In a network environment, we are only as strong as the weakest link. We owe it to ourselves that we don’t compromise the integrity of the system by individual (in)action – in this context, cost savings should be eschewed.”
