[84487] Cyberattack paralyzed banking services in Iran: Systems have returned to operation

Cyberattack paralyzes banking systems in Iran

During the last weekend, four major financial institutions in Iran — Bank Melli, Bank Tejarat, Bank Saderat, and the Export Development Bank — experienced widespread disruptions in their digital services. According to reports by the شورای هماهنگی بانک‌ها (Coordination Council of Banks), the cause of the disturbance was a "limited cyberattack" aimed at communication infrastructure shared by these institutions.

Official bodies, including the Informatics Services Company, were quick to reassure the public. According to the Council, "no unauthorized access to customer information occurred and no data was deleted." Officials emphasized that technical teams worked to carry out security and system restoration operations as soon as the unusual activity was identified.

Reports published in Iran International noted that despite the statements about a limited disruption, the service outage lasted for more than a day. On Sunday, it was reported that basic services such as credit cards, money transfers, and ATM withdrawals had returned to regular operation for these banks. The Fars News Agency confirmed that this was indeed a cyberattack, while some technical commentators, as quoted in CITNA, raised doubts regarding the stability of the infrastructure and pointed to the possibility of a "flawed software update" as a factor in the scope of the outage.

As a measure to assist customers following the incident, daily money transfer limits were increased. According to Akharin Khabar, a new limit of up to 1.5 billion rials was set for card transfers, in order to allow the public to overcome the inconvenience caused during the hours of disconnection in the national banking systems.