MoneyGram, the money transfer giant, confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack after service disruptions and customer complaints began on September 20th. Although many suspected the company was hacked, MoneyGram only issued a statement on the morning of September 23rd.

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

MoneyGram immediately investigated and implemented preventative measures, including proactively taking its systems offline, resulting in network connectivity issues. The company is cooperating with external security experts and authorities.

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The MoneyGram website is inaccessible due to a cyberattack. Photo: Bleeping Computer

On September 24th, MoneyGram announced that it had successfully restored several key transaction systems and was working urgently to get everything back to normal. The company also apologized to its customers.

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

The problem began on September 20th, when people reported being unable to receive money or process transactions through the service. The website was inaccessible. The following day, MoneyGram only announced it was experiencing a “network issue” affecting connectivity to the system without sharing any further details. Finally, on September 23rd, the company admitted the cause of the problem was a cyberattack.

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

(According to Bleeping Computer)