Thousands of financial transactions related to demat accounts were halted on Friday November 18th,2022 as the servers at the Central Depository Services (India) Limited went through a cyber attack of the malware genre.
According to sources, half of the transaction processing units were impacted by the digital attack and, out of precaution, CDSL halted its operations to block unwarranted checks and validations.
However, the transactions that weren’t successful on Friday were completed by Sunday afternoon and the IT staff tried their best to mitigate the risks associated with the attack.
Unconfirmed sources state that the attack was of ransomware variant where the hackers demanded millions of dollars in BTC to free up the database/s from encryption.
But CDSL had a recovery plan on hand and so immediately triggered it into action, to curtail risks.
Market Infrastructure Institutions (MIIs) coordinated with CDSL to complete the pending settlements on the weekend, that is usually a banking holiday.
State funded attack was ruled out in this incident, and prima facie confirmed it leaked no information related to investors to hackers.
NOTE- According to a report of CISA United States and FBI, all financial institutions across the globe should be vigilant as countries like Russia, China and North Korea were trying to exploit the servers to steal currency to fulfill the ambitions of their respective leaders. North Korea leader Kim Jong Un has apparently set up a cyber army on this note who are always in a lookout to infiltrate networks of banks and cryptocurrency exchanges to steal currencies to full fill their nuclear ambitions. Because of Sanctions, Russian leader Vladimir Putin is also trying to fund his war with Ukraine through such digital attacks, says a report from Reuters published in October 2022.
