Hackers attacked banks on behalf of the Central Bank

Hackers attacked dozens of Russian banks, sending out malicious emails on behalf of the FinCert structure of the Central Bank, RNS reports with a link to Kaspersky Lab.

“A feature of this attack was that the cybercriminals for the first time pretended to be FinCERT, a special department within the structure of the Central Bank, created about a year ago to inform Russian banks about information security incidents in the financial sector,” the report says.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the hackers used a special database compiled from bank official documents. Each letter was addressed and began with an appeal to a specific recipient.

In early March, hackers withdrew more than 677 million rubles from the accounts of Metallinvestbank. It was the biggest hack ever.

In February, the Central Bank convicted banks of withdrawing funds using hacker attacks. Then the Central Bank managed to prevent the theft of more than 500 million rubles.