Fawry completes its internal investigation: “No financial data was leaked”

Earlier this month, Fawry, Egypt’s leading e-payments solutions provider found itself under heavy fire for being the subject of a cyberattack. On 8 November, Fawry denied the claims of a cyberattack and issued a statement refuting the allegations. Fawry stated that it “categorically denies all reports on social media platforms of a cybersecurity attack on its systems or a breach of its users’ data.”

Given the strong social media backlash, customers panicking and shutting down their accounts, Fawry was taken offline. 

In attempt to contain the issue, Fawry sought the help of “Group-IB”, a leading company in the field of technical development Innovative cybersecurity techniques for detecting, repelling and protecting cyberattacks of its occurrence, in order to examine its systems and to investigate the alleged incident (the “Investigation”). Upon its competition of the Investigation, Group-IB confirmed that as of November 24 all Fawry systems operating in real time, including applications that serve all the company’s clients – myfawry application – banking applications, and payment acceptance systems, Fawry Plus systems, and retail merchant systems had not been hacked and no data was leaked.

The final Investigation confirmed that a separate part of Fawry’s application used to test applications before they are made available to the live operating environment, which is completely separate from the operating environment, had been attacked earlier. This attack resulted in the encryption of some files and the leak of data. 

In its statement, Fawry confirmed that no financial information was leaked. Yet, the statement did confirm that personal details of some of Fawry’s customers was extracted, including contact information such as addresses, phone numbers, in addition to dates of birth.

Given the severity of the data leaked, despite it not being of a financial nature, Fawry encouraged all their clients to reach out and inquire about the leaked data via its website or via contacting the customer service hotline.

The deadline for private sector companies with 50 or more employees to ensure that 3 percent of their workforce consists of Emiratis was 7 July 2023.

These measures have been introduced to encourage Emiratis to pursue skilled positions in the private sector. It was previously announced in February that firms would need to increase the proportion of Emirati employees by 1 percent every six months. The target is to reach 4 percent by the end of this year, 6 percent by the close of 2024, 8 percent the following year, and 10 percent by the end of 2026.