Late last month, the International Monetary Fund was hit by a hack. The IMF hack is crucial as the institution with 190 member countries, headquartered in Washington, DC and a major UN financial agency, had 11 email accounts infiltrated by unknown intruders in February. With the global economy undergoing rapid changes, the IMF is a crucial part of the international financial architecture.
The fund released additional details about the attacks in a press release today, including the fact that the compromise was discovered in February and that they were promptly alerted to the situation and started an investigation. After an initial analysis, the fund says, it discovered ‘that there has been no further unauthorised access to our systems or to other resources beyond the compromised email accounts’.
‘We recently identified a cyber incident at the IMF, flagged on 16 February 2024. After an intensive investigation, in consultation with our cyber security experts, we detected, contained and corrected the situation,’ the IMF said.
It said that 11 email accounts had been compromised, which it secured again but that: ‘For security reasons we won’t share any additional details about the breach.’ In recent times, Microsoft’s executive’s email accounts got hacked and experts speculate that the IMF breach could be related to Microsoft’s incident.
The IMF has experienced a ‘serious breach’ in cybersecurity before; in 2011, its networks were compromised in a ‘very major breach’, according to one official. The incident was so serious that the World Bank disconnected its computer networks from those of the IMF as a matter of caution.
Cyber attacks on global organizations are increasing, and organizations need to take necessary measures and stay vigilant to thwart such attacks.
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