The central bank of southern African country Lesotho is facing severe outages due to a cyberattack that was discovered earlier this week.
The bank released multiple statements confirming that a recent incident affected several systems.
The landlocked mountainous country is encircled by South Africa and has a population of more than 2 million.
Local news outlets reported that because the country's currency - the Loti - is pegged to South Africa's rand, there were concerns that the incident might affect the exchange rate.
South Africa has been at the center of two headline-grabbing cybersecurity incidents this year.
In June, the state-owned Development Bank of Southern Africa confirmed that it was hit by ransomware.
The country's Defense Department was attacked by another ransomware gang in September and it nearly caused an international incident because it took place during an already controversial BRICS Summit in Johannesburg.
The gang leaked the personal phone number and email of the country's president alongside a portion of the 1.6 terabytes of data stolen from the country's defense systems.
The government initially denied the attack before admitting that a breach did occur.
A report from cybersecurity company Zimperium this week said 29 malware families were used to target 1,800 banking applications across 61 countries in the last year.
For comparison, the researchers saw 10 prolific malware families in 2022 target 600 banking apps.
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Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014.
Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia.
He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.
This Cyber News was published on therecord.media. Publication date: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 15:30:31 +0000