The Bank of Zambia says it refused to pay ransom to a group known as Hive that was behind a cybersecurity breach that caused minimal damage to its systems last week.
Last week, the Central Bank disclosed that recent technical outages resulted from a cyberattack.
“All of our core systems are still up and running,” Greg Nsofu, information and communications technology director at the Bank of Zambia, told Journalists in Lusaka.
“The disruption, which affected some systems at the Bank such as the Bureau De Change Monitoring System and the Website, emanated from a suspected cybersecurity incident. We wish to advise that these systems have since been fully restored.”
“Not much sensitive data has actually been shipped out.”
Mr. Nsofu said, “So we pretty much told them where to get off,” confirming that it was someone affiliated with the bank who responded to Hive.
After suffering a ransomware attack by the Hive operation, the Bank of Zambia made it clear that they were not going to pay by posting a picture of male genitalia and telling the hackers to s… (well, you can use your imagination).
While the Bank of Zambia did not disclose the details of the cyberattack, BleepingComputer learned that the attack was conducted by the Hive ransomware operation, which claimed to have encrypted the bank’s Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.
However, instead of paying the ransom, the bank representatives responded to the ransom negotiation by making fun of the hacker’s ’14m3-sk1llz.’
They then proceeded to post a link to a dick pic while stating, “suck this dick and stop locking bank networks thinking that you will monetize something, learn to monetize.”
BleepingComputer has contacted the Bank of Zambia with further questions about this incident but has not received a response.