National Bank of Kenya has confirmed losing Ksh 29 million to fraudsters who infiltrated its systems on Wednesday during business hours.
In a statement, the bank, however, said customers’ accounts had not been affected by the attempted fraud.
Earlier reports social media had indicated that at least Ksh 340 million was lost in what was alleged to be an in house infiltration of the bank’s IT systems.
“We confirm that there was an attempted fraud in normal course of business on 17th January but the bank’s monitoring and security resources frustrated the attempt. The amount of attempted fraud is about 29 million and we have confidence that we will recover all the cash,” read part of the statement.
The bank indicated that detectives had taken up the matter and were in pursuit of the fraudsters and investigations are ongoing.
Kenyan banks have for long been the main victims of cyber crime with the 2016 Cybersecurity Report 2016 issued by Serianu, a local information technology (IT) services and business consulting firm, indicating that financial institutions lost Ksh 18 billion (US$175 million) in 2016. Most of the attacks were linked to insiders.
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The Central Bank of Kenya has, however, since formulated guidelines requiring lenders to formulate policy, strategy and a framework to fight the crime.
They are also required to elevate chief information security officers to the senior managerial level to enforce cyber security policy and oversee implementation of the strategy.
