Money transfer giant MoneyGram confirmed it was hacked after service disruptions and customer complaints began on September 20. Although many suspected the company was hacked, MoneyGram only spoke up on the morning of September 23.

In a statement, the world's second-largest money transfer service said it had "detected a cybersecurity incident affecting part of its system."

MoneyGram immediately investigated and took protective measures, including proactively taking its systems offline, which resulted in the affected network connectivity. The company is working with outside security experts and authorities.

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MoneyGram website is inaccessible due to a cyber attack. Photo: Bleeping Computer

On September 24, MoneyGram announced that it had successfully restored some important transaction systems and was still working urgently to bring everything back to normal. At the same time, the company also apologized to customers.

MoneyGram is a peer-to-peer money transfer and payments company that allows people to send and receive money through a network of 350,000 physical locations in 200 countries or through a mobile app or website. They are second only to Western Union in size, processing 120 million transactions a year from tens of millions of users.

The problem began on September 20, when people reported being unable to receive money or process transactions through the service. The website was inaccessible. The next day, MoneyGram only announced that it was experiencing “network issues” affecting its connection to the system, without sharing any further details. Finally, on September 23, the company admitted that the problem was due to a cyber attack.

According to Bleeping Computer, the prolonged outage and loss of connectivity to the system are signs of a ransomware attack. Given MoneyGram's massive customer base, a potential data breach would have far-reaching implications for many people.

(According to Bleeping Computer)