Hope Payment Service Bank, one of Nigeria’s leading payment service banks, recently thwarted a fraudulent cyberattack targeted at its banking platform, retrieving billions of Naira in the intended attack.
THE WITNESS gathered that the digital bank was promptly alerted of the attack and was able to truncate it at the nick of time. Speaking on the development, financial analysts have commended the bank’s robust technology, and the speed with which the situation was arrested.
‘Without doubt, the bank has a proactive approach to fraud prevention and detection. They were able to notice and mitigate the attacker’s efforts at a very early stage, before it went out of hand’, the analyst said.
This newspaper further learnt that while the fraudsters had attempted to withdraw money that was not theirs, the attack was not targeted at any customers’ account and no customer’s funds were affected.
A business partner of the bank who opted to be anonymous celebrated the bank’s responsiveness to the situation, confirming that the bank swung into action immediately by communicating a downtime, and that functionalities have since been restored.
“We received a mail from the bank alluding to a downtime and we were reliably informed when services were restored. We have since resumed transacting with the platform, and everything is going well. Nothing is missing or different”, he said.
While customers and partners had wondered at the bank’s unexpected downtime, an industry expert opined that it was indeed a smart response on the part of the bank. “That action was imperative to protect customers’ funds, which must be the primary concern of any bank. The few hours of downtime allowed them to isolate and mitigate the attack”, he explained.
Reacting to the development, users of the digital bank who were contacted expressed confidence in the bank. According to them, the bank has been fully functional, and transactions have been going through as expected. Our investigations further revealed that the bank has never been associated with fraud in its almost five years of existence.
To see the matter to a conclusive end, the bank has reported the attack to the right regulatory bodies and taken appropriate legal action, in furtherance of their commitment to maintaining trust through transparent and prompt communication.
