Retired scientist retrieves Rs3 million withdrawn by hackers from bank acccount

ISLAMABAD: A retired scientist mysteriously regained his Rs3 million in his bank account, on Wednesday, which was withdrawn by hackers earlier this week.

Dr Yousuf Khilji got his money back into the account following the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) notice sent to the concerned bank.

Amid multiple incidents of hacking bank accounts lately, on Monday, the retired scientist discovered that he had lost his life’s savings in a suspected fraud transactions.

According to details, the suspected transactions were carried out on October 25 and 26.

A day earlier, various media reports surfaced notifying that a major cyber attack on several Pakistani banks had taken place. Rejecting media reports that the data of most banks has been hacked, the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) said that no evidence of banks data being hacked had been reported, except for one.

“We would like to emphasize that except for the incident of October 27, 2018 in which reportedly the IT security of one bank was compromised, no breach has been reported,” the central bank added.

The state bank said it had already instructed all banks to take steps to identify and counter any cyber threat to their systems in coordination with international payment schemes. Representatives of payment schemes had also assured that all steps were being taken to help banks in identifying any cyber threat on card systems and had offered additional controls to them, it said.

“In addition to the above, some banks are putting in place further precautionary measures while others are confident of the security of their systems and continue to make all card transactions fully available to their customers.