India’s Motilal Oswal says operations unaffected by cyber incident

BENGALURU : India’s Motilal Oswal Financial Services said on Monday its operations were unaffected following a cyber incident last week.

The company said it had detected malicious activity on the computers of some employees and remedied the issue within an hour. The financial services company did not provide details of the attack.

“This incident has not affected any of our business operations and IT environment. It is business as usual,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

The breach was first reported last week by U.S. news website TechCrunch.

LockBit, a cybercrime group which extorts its victims by stealing and releasing data unless a ransom is paid, was responsible for the attack on Motilal Oswal, TechCrunch reported.

The group, first seen on Russian language-based cybercrime forums in 2020, has been detected all over the world, with organisations in the United States, India and Brazil among common targets, cybersecurity firm Trend Micro said last year.

Motilal Oswal services around 6 million clients and had assets of 1.27 trillion rupees ($15.30 billion) under its asset and wealth management category as of Dec. 31.

Shares in the brokerage closed 4.5 per cent lower on Monday.

($1 = 83.0091 Indian rupees)