BN Americas posted an article on October 27, 2020, about FirstBank in Puerto Rico being targeted in a cyberattack. Below are some key highlights:
- The bank said in a statement Monday that its parent company had “detected an alert in its technological infrastructure that indicated a cybersecurity incident affecting certain customer service channels,” starting 72 hours earlier.
- The statement said that as of yet “there is no evidence of misuse of [client] customer data,” and added, “This event is not related to, nor has it had any impact on the recent acquisition of Santander.”
- Upon realizing the attack was underway, the bank said it immediately activated existing security protocols, notified authorities and regulators, and started an investigation.
- “ the incident and the preventive measures taken affected certain service channels, the incident did not affect the applications or the bank’s mainframe,” said FirstBank.
- Since Friday, thousands of customers, including commercial clients, have been denied access to their accounts, according to dozens of comments on FirstBank’s Facebook page.
- Customers, according to their complaints on the social network and from consumers who reported their situation to local daily El Nuevo Día, did not have access to balances and could not carry out transactions such as loan payments.
- The bank said that it “will be eliminating those charges for late payments on FirstBank accounts as a result of this situation.”
- Puerto Rico was the target of 83mn cyberattack attempts between January and June, part of the estimated 15bn attempts in Latin America and the Caribbean during the same period, according to data from cybersecurity firm Fortinet’s LatAm threat intelligence insider platform.
- “With the massive transition to the home office, cybercriminals find a significant number of misconfigured remote desktop protocol (RDP) servers, leading to more such attacks,” said Fortinet.
- The firm said that the move towards remote work and distance learning due to the pandemic has rekindled the interest of cybercriminals in brute force attacks, “which are repeated and systematic attempts to guess a credential by sending different usernames and passwords to try to access a system.”
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