Ecuador’s Banco Pichincha has yet to recover after recent cyberattack

The customers of Banco Pichincha, the largest bank in Ecuador, are still experiencing service disruptions after a massive cyberattack hit the financial organization early this week.

The cyberattack took place over the last weekend and forced the bank to shut down a large part of its computer network in response to the incident.

Many services of the bank were disrupted, including online banking, mobile app, and ATM network, many customers crowded the Pichincha bank branches that remained open the days after the cyber attack. The Banco Pichincha has about 1.5 million clients for a portfolio of $1.5 billion.

The bank issued a statement on Monday to inform the customers about the cyber attack, it also added to have “identified a cybersecurity incident in our systems that has partially disabled our services.”

The main bank shareholder, Fidel Egas, tweeted that “We are doing the impossible. They want to blame us for something in which we are the victims.”

The authorities, including the Superintendency of Banks, are investigating the incident.

The public information about the attack suggests that the bank was the victim of a ransomware attack, sources in the cybersecurity industry confirmed it to BleepingComputer.

This is the second attack suffered by the Ecuador bank this year, in February a cybercrime group called ‘Hotarus Corp’ has breached the Banco Pichincha, and the local Ministry of Finance (the Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas de Ecuador). The group claimed to have also stolen data from the Banco Pichincha bank and infected a system at Ministry of Finance using for training purposes with PHP-based ransomware.

An alleged member of the @HotarusCorp leaked on a hacking forum a link to a file containing 6500 records (Email, Identity Card numbers, and passwords) that claims to Ministry of Finance.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Banco Pichincha)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.