The National Water Supply and Drainage Board has confirmed that no data breach occurred during a cyberattack on its SMS gateway on Sunday.
An unauthorized individual accessed the agency’s website and used the SMS portal to send about 10,000 fraudulent messages to customers, said Pradeep Herath, additional general manager at the Water Board. The messages falsely claimed that the system had been hacked and demanded a ransom of 1.5 Bitcoin for data recovery.
Herath said immediate steps were taken to secure internal systems, and the SMS service was restored soon after the breach.
Customer data was not compromised, officials said. (Newswire)