Cosmos Bank Cyber Attack Case Study
Cosmos Bank Cyber Attack Case Study
The bank is headquartered in Pune in its Corporate Office - Cosmos Tower near on
Ganeshkhind Road, Shivajinagar, Pune.
Timeline A complaint has been filed with Pune police about the malware attack and
Cosmos Bank Cyber Attack the bank is doing internal audits to investigate the breach on 14 August 3
2017 (4.00 AM IST)
As a precautionary measure, the bank has closed all its servers and net
banking facilities, according to the official (14 Aug. 5.00 AM IST) 4
Realising the cyber attack, the bank then registered an FIR with the
Chatushringi police station on 14, August 2017 (6.00 AM IST) 5
Vulnerability #1 Vulnerability #2
Overall Summary
Infrastructure was not fully Multi Factor Authentication
Bank’s software and updated was not enabled for users.
infrastructure was not
fully updated. Most of
the data was saved on
premises server. File
server patch was not
installed though it was
scheduled. Lack of Vulnerability #4
Vulnerabilities communication between
different IT department Lack of training and
made situation more Vulnerability #3 education in IT security
worse. Team and users
IT security team was not iManage/File site patch was
fully equipped and not installed
trained to stop these kind
of attack. Users were not
properly educated to
save their personal
information.
Costs Prevention
•Back up data regularly – verifying data integrity and testing the restoration
• The total losses from the attack process
•Secure your offline backups – ensuring backups are not connected permanently
stand at INR 94 crore, or 13.5 to the computers and networks they’re backing up on
•Audit firewalls, servers and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) configurations –
million USD. Cosmos Bank was block access to known malicious IP addresses & Server Message Block (SMB)
ports 139 and 445, and disable SMBV1 and Windows Management
Instrumentation Command Line (WMIC) in servers and Active Directory (AD)
forced to close its ATM operations •Patch operating systems, software and firmware on devices – use a centralised
patch-management system
and suspend online and mobile •Scan all incoming and outgoing emails – detect threats and filter executable
files from reaching end users using sandboxing
banking facilities. •Enable strong spam filters to prevent phishing emails – authenticate inbound
email using technologies such as Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain
Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and Domain
Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) to prevent spoofing