The Bank of Zambia is the central bank of Zambia, the landlocked country at the crossroads of Central, Southern and East Africa.
What this means, its principal responsibility is to create and implement monetary policy to help maintain the economic stability of the country. Not only that, Bank of Zambia is also active in promoting financial inclusion policy, and is also a leading member of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion.
The bank is also one of the original 17 regulatory institutions to make specific national commitments to financial inclusion under the Maya Declaration, during the Global Policy Forum, held in Riviera Maya, Mexico in 2011.
With such huge responsibility, it's obvious that it is among the most alluring hacking targets.
And indeed, the bank finally fell as victim of a ransomware attack by the Hive operation.
But unlike most others that have been hacked by ransomware attacks, the Bank of Zambia isn't staying quiet, nor responding to the hackers by paying the ransom.
Instead, the bank sent a picture of a male genitalia.
It all began when the Bank of Zambia disclosed technical outages resulted from a cyberattack.
"The disruption, which affected some systems at the Bank such as the Bureau De Change Monitoring System and the Website, emanated from a suspected cybersecurity incident. We wish to advise that these systems have since been fully restored."
Rather than responding the hackers by fulfilling their demand, the bank sent the dick pic, with the accompanying message:
The statement was sent, in order to make fun of the hacker's '14m3-sk1llz.'
While the disruption first began on May 9th, the bank's systems were affected in a bad way until at least May 14th.
In case anyone wondered what made us to think about this subject, it's now public: https://t.co/d28iUxhbfI
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) May 18, 2022
The Bank of Zambia did not disclose the details of the cyberattack, but a report from Bleeping Computer suggests that the Hive ransomware operation had encrypted the bank's Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.
When Bleeping Computer saw the message from the bank, the technology news website initially thought that unrelated individuals hijacked the negotiation chat, which have been seen happening numerous times in the past.
This chat led security researcher at MalwareHunterTeam to post a poll asking whether people felt pics like this in a ransom negotiation meant it was hijacked or the message was from the victim.
The poll results were surprising, with the majority of responders saying it was from the victim.
It is reported that the bank declined to pay or follow the hackers because it was capable of solving the issue by itself.
This was revealed by the Bank of Zambia’s technical director Dr. Gregory C. Nsofu, who supervises the bank's Information and Communications Technology department. Nsofu said that the bank didn't need assistance to restore its systems.
"Knowing that we had protected our core systems, it wasn’t really necessary for us to even engage," said Nsofu.
"So we pretty much told them where to get off."
"All of our core systems are still up and running. Not much sensitive data has actually been shipped out."