Operations unaffected by cyber incident: Motilal Oswal

Cyberattack: Brokerage firm Motilal Oswal Financial Services has said its operations remain unaffected after a last week cyber incident. 

The company faced a cybercrime incident from LockBit, which extorts victims for ransom money by stealing and releasing data, as per a report by TechCrunch.

Motilal Oswal had become aware of malicious activity on some employees’ computers, after which the issue was resolved in an hour. 

No further details of the attack were divulged by the brokerage firm.  

"This incident has not affected any of our business operations and IT environment. It is business as usual," the company said in a response to Reuters.

The group was first detected on Russian language-based cybercrime forums, and has now come to light globally. Lockbit has organisations which mainly target  the United States, India and Brazil among their other common targets, as per a last year report by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro. 

Motilal Oswal has around 6 million clients and its assets are worth Rs 1.27 trillion ($15.30 billion), which come in subset of its asset and wealth management category as of December 31.

Shares for the company closed 4.5 per cent lower at Rs 1,754.75 on Monday, February 19.

The advancement of technology has given way to a host of cyberfraud trends such as ransomware, ID fraud, attack in supply chain, phishing and denial of service attacks.  

Skill shortage, legacy systems and balancing security and user experience are some of the reasons why cyberattacks are on the rise.