Guaranty Trust Bank (GTBank) has confirmed that there was an isolated attempt by hackers to steal its customers’ data.
In a statement on Thursday, the bank said contrary to media reports, hackers had not cloned its website nor stolen customers information, even though they tried to do so.
There were rumours on Wednesday that the bank’s website had been hacked and customers’ data compromised. The Tier-1 bank’s customers were forced to transfer their money to other banks. GTB customers on social media panicked, calling the customer care numbers for related enquiries.
But the bank said the rumours were not totally true.
“Our attention has been drawn to reports in the media alleging that hackers have seized the Bank’s website, cloned it and intercepted customer data.
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“While there was an isolated incident of an attempt to compromise our website domain, we would like to assure all our Customers and Stakeholders that the Bank’s website has not been cloned and that we do not store customer information on our website, and as such, there has been no instance of compromise of customer data.”
The lender noted that its website had not been cloned, assuring that its information security experts were working diligently to restore its domain settings.
“Our dedicated team of Information Security Experts are currently working round the clock to restore domain settings,” the statement said.
GTBank urged customers “disregard the claims in these media reports,” assuring them of its unwavering commitment to safeguarding customer data.
What could have gone wrong?
An Economy Post tech consultant, Mr Dayo Mustapha, gave a professional view of what might have happened to the bank. He said most banks in Nigeria did not have data warehouse and relied mainly on enterprise vendors for solutions-oriented applications.
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“Relying on Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and the like does not help to secure users’ or customers’ data. It may be expensive to build your own infrastructure, but you are sure it is built by your own team and not outsiders.
“Banks need to be innovating and reinventing the system to meet situations like this. If you can’t build, you can acquire and integrate the infrastructure into your system. Amazon was using Oracle database but decided to build its own cloud infrastructure after a while to cut down costs and protect users’ data.
“Amazon has moved its major infrastructure away from Oracle and now owns AWS, which is one of the top cloud services companies in the world,” he explained, urging Nigerian banks to rejig their systems and spend more on the infrastructure to protect themselves and their customers.
Fraud rising in Nigeria
Nigeria’s financial institutions such as banks lost N17.6 billion ($11.2 million) to fraud in 2023, according to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System’s (NIBSS)’s Annual Fraud Landscape report.
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The report disclosed that fraud had increased in Africa’s most populous nation every year in the past five years.
The total fraud losses rose from N2.96 billion in 2019 to N11.61 billion in 2022. Between 2019 and 2023, the total amount lost to fraud increased by 496 percent to ₦17.6 billion, Techpoint Africa reported.
A recent study by Surfshark, an Amsterdam-based cybersecurity firm, showed that Nigeria was the 32nd most breached nation in the first quarter of 2023.
The report noted that Nigeria recorded 82,000 leaked accounts between January and March 2023, representing a 64 percent jump from the result of the previous quarter.
A US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 2020 report had ranked Nigeria as the 16th nation most affected by internet crimes. The report said Nigeria received 443 complaints relating to internet crimes in 2020, The Cable reported.
