Hit by a fraud, the City Union Bank on Monday claimed they have successfully blocked and retrieved money from two of the three cyber attacks in their system. Two days ago, in the three cyber attacks from abroad, hackers withdrew around two million dollars from the bank.
Similar to Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud, money was transferred through the SWIFT financial platform in case of the City Union Bank also.
“During our reconciliation process on February 7, it was found out that 3 fraudulent remittances had gone through our SWIFT system to our correspondent banks which were not initiated from our bank’s end. We immediately alerted the correspondent banks to recall the funds,” City Union Bank said in a regulatory filing on stock exchanges.
Speaking to the media, City Union Bank MD and CEO N Kamakodi said that the third attack was from China and the bank had made it under litigation to protect its money.
“The hackers entered illegally and made three transactions.
As our risk management system was very robust, we could immediately catch it with about three transactions and less than two million dollars and we could retrieve or block two of the three cases that went to three different countries,” said Kamakodi. In the three cyber attacks, money was transacted to Dubai, Turkey and China.
The hacking happened on February 17 night and the bank’s cyber team discovered it the next morning. The Bank MD said the cyber attack from Turkey-based hackers was blocked and money is going to be retrieved in few days. “The quantum of money which now has to go through legal process in China is about one million dollars, which is well within risk management framework that we have and there is nothing to worry about it,” he said.
Kamakodi said that except the word ‘SWIFT’ - Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, there is no commonality between Nirav Modi and our bank’s case.