By: Foday Manneh
The Central Bank of The Gambia reportedly overpaid millions of Dalasis in salaries for November 2022 to civil service workers in the wake of its recent hacking by unknown cyber criminals demanding 2.5 Million Dollars as ransom to release sensitive transactional data gleaned from one of the Banks servers.
Earlier, the spokesperson of the Gambia government, Ebrima G. Sankareh, revealed that the breached server had been identified and isolated.
The major data breach of the CBG was linked to unknown International hackers who claimed access to two terabytes (2TB) of vital data demanding 2.5 million dollars in ransom to return them.
The hacking, confirmed by the government, which said the Bank acted quickly to secure its systems and launched investigations to determine the nature, source, and extent of the incident, is the biggest-ever data breach faced by a Gambian Bank and financial institution.
In the latest fallout since the confirmation of the data breach, a source at the CBG told TAT that several government staff reportedly received D3 million in mistakenly deposited salaries for November as the Bank struggles to strengthen its digital firewalls and get down to the bottom of the cyber-attack.
“The hacking allegation against the Central Bank is proved by payment of November 2022 salaries yesterday, mistakenly paying employees as much as 800,000, 500,000, 1,000,000, and more in posted wages,” the source revealed.
“Head of ICT under Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs informed his staffers not to send remaining salaries, asking them to hold on until the data breach is resolved,” He revealed.
A government’s press dispatch on the cyber-attack said none of the mission-critical CBG systems were compromised. Only one server was affected and has been quickly identified and isolated.
