New Zealand’s Reserve Bank data systems were hacked by an anonymous hacker who potentially secured access to sensitive and personal information. The hacker managed to get his hands on a third-party file sharing service, the one used by Central Bank of New Zealand to share and reserve sensitive information.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand based in Wellington, commonly named as Te Putea Matua is accountable for generating monetary policy to stabilize prices in the nation. The Governor of Reserve Bank of New Zealand Adrian Orr assured the public that the data breach has been restrained and the bank’s core functions “remain sound and operational”.
Threat actors have targeted a number of major organizations in New Zealand in the past year. New Zealand Stock Exchange was one of the prominent victims of the cyber attack and its servers were knocked out for nearly a week in August 2020. In a conversation with Radio New Zealand, Dave Parry the professor of computer science at Auckland University told that there might be a possibility of another government’s influence behind the Reserve Bank data leak.
Adrian Orr stated that “we are working closely with domestic and international security experts and other relevant authorities as part of our investigation and response to this malicious attack. The nature and extent of information that has been potentially accessed is still being determined, but it may include some commercially and personally sensitive information. The system has been secured and taken offline until we have completed our initial investigations”.
Till further investigations, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is currently considering alternative techniques to secure data and has taken its systems offline.
