Finastra, a company that provides a range of technology solutions to banks worldwide, said it was shutting down key systems in response to a security breach discovered Friday morning. The company’s public statement and notice to customers does not mention the cause of the outage, but their response so far is straight out of the playbook for dealing with ransomware attacks.
London-based Finastra has offices in 42 countries and reported more than $2 billion in revenues last year. The company employs more than 10,000 people and has over 9,000 customers across 130 countries — including nearly all of the top 50 banks globally.
Earlier today, sources at two different U.S. financial institutions forwarded a notice they received from Finastra saying the outage was expected to disrupt certain services, particularly for clients in North America.
“We wish to inform our valued customers that we are investigating a potential security breach. At 3:00 a.m. EST on March 20, 2020, we were alerted to anomalous activity on our network which risked the integrity of our data-centers,” reads the notice. “As such, and to protect our customers, we have taken quick and strict remedial action to contain and isolate the incident, while we investigate further.”
The statement continues:
“Our approach has been to temporarily disconnect from the internet the affected servers, both in the USA and elsewhere, while we work closely with our cybersecurity experts to inspect and ensure the integrity of each server in turn. Using this ‘isolation, investigation and containment’ approach will allow us to bring the servers back online as quickly as possible, with minimum disruption to service, however we are anticipating some disruption to certain services, particularly in North America, whilst we undertake this task. Our priority is ensuring the integrity of the servers before we bring them back on ..
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