ElectraCard Services, one of the Indian companies, that has been victim of the $45-million heist by cyber criminals, says the breach occurred almost six months ago and the amount involved was only a fraction of what is being reported. ElectraCard Services chairman and CEO Ramesh Mengawade says that incident was being clubbed with the recent $40-million fraudulent withdrawal reported which made it look bigger than it was and the implication for ElectraCard was huge.
?The breach was detected and the customer was informed about it. This involved only four to five customer accounts and the bank?s customers were not impacted,? says Mengawade. ElectraCard refused to name the customer. US regulators named the customer?s name as National Bank of Ras Al Khaimah PSC (RAKBANK) which lost around $5 million in the breach.
This incident was not going to impact them financially but it had hurt the reputation they had built over the years, says Mengawade, who is also one of the founders of the company headquartered in Pune. Opus Software is a 15-year-old software development company while ECS is a seven-year-old subsidiary which offers software as a service and payments processing solutions. The company that has just notched up a consolidated turnover of R220 crore (FY13) with bulk of the business coming from Opus and a small share from ECS. These events would put brakes on the ambitious global expansion plans of ECS and Opus.
While the focus of ECS so far was on the APAC, West Asia and Africa, the company was charting out plans for the US markets. ECS now has had to undergo a re-certifying and re-listing process for compliance with the PCI-DSS standards of the PCI Security Standards Council, which will set them back for some time and resources.
ECS has 100 customers worldwide, who were informed, and only 25 of these were on the processing platform that was affected, says Mengawade. So, there was no panic response to these developments but it did raise concern among the customers.