The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) said on Monday that no bank, other than the National Bank of Pakistan (NBP), was affected by the recent cybersecurity attack.

The statement comes after unconfirmed reports suggested that hackers had gained access to the security systems of at least nine Pakistani banks, and made withdrawals worth millions of rupees.

Taking to Twitter, the central bank termed all such reports as "fake," adding that “no financial loss or data breach has been observed so far” and that the situation is being monitored closely.

“Some fake news regarding cybersecurity attack on banks is in circulation including remarks attributed to Chief Spokesman, Abid Qamar. According to this fake news, 9 banks have been affected by the attack and that money has been withdrawn and data [was] stolen,” the tweet added.

On October 30, the SBP, while confirming the cyber attack on the NBP system, said that no other bank had reported any such incident.

“In the late hours of (October) 29 and early morning of October 30, a cyber-attack on the NBP's servers was detected which impacted some of its services,” NBP said in a statement.

NBP faces cyber-attack, no financial loss reported, says SBP

“Immediate steps were taken to isolate the affected systems. At this point, no customer or financial data has been compromised. Remediation efforts are underway using industry-leading subject matter experts including international resources where ever required.”

The incident, that caused the disruption in bank services across the country, was of serious nature, given that NBP is one of the largest banks in Pakistan with deposits amounting to Rs2.4 trillion, according to its 2020 report.

Hundreds of thousands of government employees, pensioners, and state-owned entities, forming a big part of its client base, were affected during the weekend. This article first appeared in Business Recorder here: https://www.brecorder.com/news/40130474/no-bank-other-than-nbp-faced-cyberattack-says-sbp