“Cybersecurity incident” takes down Lesotho’s entire payments system
Interbank and international payments routed through Lesotho are offline following a cyberattack impacting its central bank.
A reliable industry source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told MyBroadband that all their payments from South Africa routing through Lesotho are down.
The Central Bank of Lesotho confirmed that it experienced a “cyber-security incident” on Monday, 11 December 2023.
It did not give details about the nature of the attack.
“The Bank has investigated the matter and is working around the clock to restore the systems,” it said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
“The Bank wishes to assure the public that it has not suffered any financial or other loss.”
The bank said it suspended some of its systems to prevent further infiltration.
“Consequently, some payments may be delayed while the Bank works on getting the systems back to normalcy,” it stated.
In a follow-up statement on Wednesday, the central bank acknowledged the outage of its National Payments System.
“[This] has made it impossible for all local banks to honour inter-bank transactions in the country.”
It explained that these are payments and transactions that would normally flow from one bank to another.
“Technical teams from the Central Bank of Lesotho as [well as] the Regulator and the banking industry as a whole are working tirelessly to resolve the issue and the nation will be notified as soon as the system is back in operation,” it said.
“The CBL and BAL Members have now agreed to institute business continuity processes and measures as alternative ways to facilitate payments and transactions between all banks.”
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