The bank that handles nearly half of all transactions in Malta, Bank of Valletta, had to shut down all its systems on Wednesday after a group of cybercriminals redirected their funds abroad.
Joseph Muscat, the Prime Minister of Malta, stated that the attack involved making fraudulent payments totaling 13 millions of euros to various banks around the world.
Bank of Valletta has recorded the transactions and is managing operations to recover the money.
The cyberattack was detected shortly after Wednesday's transactions began, as state security services alerted them, Upon noticing discrepancies during the reconciliation of international transactions.
The Prime Minister said that different problems arose due to the bank's shutdown, Especially for credit card holders who needed to make payments.
The representatives of the Bank of Valletta discussed with the Prime Minister, That they were looking for ways to gradually resume all pending operations to ensure that this failure does not happen again. The banking institution is also conducting reviews of its internal systems to identify where the problem originated and how to fix it.
This is the first case of an attack on a Maltese bank where the bank was completely halted to detect and stop the threat.