The website of Bangladesh Bank (BB) remained offline yesterday, a day after the central bank took it down following a global cybersecurity alert.
The site has been inaccessible since yesterday noon. Visitors see a notice reading: “The Service is under Maintenance. Our service is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We will be back online shortly. Thank you for your patience.”
Arief Hossain Khan, executive director and spokesperson of the central bank, said, “We are still observing the situation. We want to ensure full security, which is why we have not restored the website.”
He said the connection between the central bank and commercial banks was running smoothly.
“Our IT department is working on it,” he added, without saying when the website would be restored.
The BB took the site down on Thursday as a precaution after receiving the alert. The site was still down till the filing of this report at 1:00pm.
The move mirrors emergency steps taken worldwide after critical flaws were disclosed in PHP, a widely used programming language. Cybersecurity firms Calif and Wiz uncovered the flaws using artificial intelligence tools. Patches were released, but details became public before the fixes could be fully applied.
The central bank has faced cyber incidents before. In 2016, hackers diverted $101 million from its account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, prompting then governor Atiur Rahman to resign.
In 2023, the BB shut some internal web-based services for 36 hours as a precaution against a possible cyberattack.