Massive Cyberattack Against Banco de Venezuela, S.A. (September 2021)
In mid-September 2021, Banco de Venezuela suffered a massive cyberattack that severely disrupted its financial services and online platform for several days. Although the Venezuelan government officially characterized the incident as a “terrorist attack” and a “massive hack” intended to tamper with banking data and sabotage the economy, the specific threat actor and the exact nature of the attack—such as whether ransomware was deployed or data was exfiltrated—remain unverified.
Overview
Missing evidence
Impact details
Banco de Venezuela experienced a serious platform outage between September 15 and 17, 2021. Statements from the government and the bank described the incident as sabotage or a massive cyberattack and assured the integrity of account data; users reported prolonged service instability, missing balances, and problems viewing transactions. No public source has confirmed the presence of ransomware or a data breach.
Classification & severity
- Category
- Availability
- Subtype
- banking platform outage or service disruption
- Confidence
- High
Official sources and media outlets are reporting a major banking platform outage and concerns about data integrity; no ransomware or data exfiltration has been confirmed.
Severity assessment
High- Functional impact
- Denial (critical)
- Information impact
- Integrity loss
- Affected scope
- Multiple users
- Critical service
- Disrupted
- Public confidence
- Significant
- Recoverability
- Extended
A major service disruption at a state-owned bank has revealed issues with data and transaction integrity, with widespread impact on customers; no breach of confidentiality has been confirmed.
Timeline
An unknown actor listed Banco de Venezuela, S.A. as an alleged victim.