Government pension fund shuts down systems to fight cyberattack

The Government Employees Pension Fund (GEPF) experienced a security breach when an unauthorised party attempted to access its systems, and the entity shut down its systems to isolate the breach.
It says no data has been compromised and that pensioner payments are unaffected. However, an anonymous source told MyBroadband no payments have been made since 12 February 2024.
We approached the GEPF to get further information about the outage. It emphasised that the incident was not an outage and that it shut down its systems as a security measure.
“There was no outage. However, the systems were shut down by our administrator (GPAA) as a security measure due to an attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems,” it told MyBroadband.
“It is important to note that this system shutdown did not compromise our data nor affect payments to be made to pensioners.”
However, our source says this isn’t the case.
“They are not even doing applications manually. No payments have happened since 12 February,” they said.
“The self-service site and call centre are still down this morning (Wednesday, 21 February 2024).”
According to a notice on the GEPF website, it detected the unauthorised attempt to access its systems on 16 February 2024, and the notice reiterates that “no payments were affected” and that “members will receive their benefits as per their usual payment dates”.
It told MyBroadband that an estimated time of restoration isn’t available yet.
“The team is currently working to restore all systems based on priority and urgency, and there are no timelines as to when all systems will be back online however significant progress has been made on the restoration,” it said.
There is some confusion over the entity’s notices regarding the outage. It first said its call centre and its walk-in centre in Sunnyside, Pretoria, were closed due to “technical issues” on Wednesday, 14 February.

A GEPF notice from Thursday, 15 February, claimed that a burst water pipe was to blame for the call centre and office outage.
However, a notice published the following day said these centres were closed due to a burst pipe disrupting the water supply to its office buildings.
“Normal work operations will resume tomorrow, 16 February 2024,” it added in its notice on Wednesday, 14 February.
“Kindly note that all the other GEPF offices and walk-in centres remain open to the public.”
The GEPF’s reasoning behind the outages changed again on Friday, 16 February, when it released a statement saying the Government Pensions Administration Agency’s (GPAA’s) systems were offline.
“GPAA is unable to assist clients at our regional offices, call centre, mobile offices, and co-locations with pension administration queries,” it said.
It asked clients not to visit GEPF offices nationwide until it informs its members that the systems are fully online.
It provided a further update following Friday’s statement, saying it had experienced an attempt to gain unauthorised access to its systems, which was detected on Friday.
“The incident required GPAA, as part of their security measures to shut down all systems to isolate affected areas and prevent any breaches,” its latest notice reads.
“After the shutting down of systems, the GPAA immediately embarked on a process to restore systems and prevent any incidents.”
“However, the Fund has assured that no payments were affected by this incident,” the GEPF reiterated.
It added that its members’ personal information remains safe and that it will continue to provide updates until its systems are online.
Its latest notice, which has been up since Monday, 19 February 2024, is included below.