Ecuador’s largest bank’s system shut down for multiple days after cyber attack

During the weekend of the 10^th of October 2021, Banco Pichincha, Ecuador’s largest private bank experienced a cyberattack that led to disruption to their operations and meant that their ATM and online banking portal was taken offline. Due to the shutdown of their IT system, employees are notified that bank applications, email, digital channels, and self-services will not be operational and that customers that looked to use self-service options should be redirected to the bank teller windows while the issue is being solved.

After two days of the outage, the bank issues a statement on Tuesday Afternoon, declaring that they had suffered a cyberattack that was responsible for the outage. Even though some of the systems have been restated, many of the services are still down. Sources in the cybersecurity industry have stated they believe that a ransomware attack was responsible and that the threat actors had install a cobalt strike beacon on the bank’s network. Although at this time, the bank has not announced what kind of attack they experienced.