BPI on data glitch: ‘100% not a hack’

The Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) has ruled out hacking as the cause of the processing error earlier this month.

"100 percent not a hack," BPI executive vice president for enterprise services Ramon Jocson said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Jocson earlier said the error was caused by a programmer who was processing transactions in a rush.

He was referring to the internal error in its system which caused transactions from April 27 to May 2 to be double-posted as of June 6.

SENATE HEARING

BPI told the Senate panel that the errors that showed up in the outstanding balances of clients' accounts with the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) were caused by a programmer who was in a rush to process transactions, the lender revealed Wednesday.

BPI Executive Vice President for Enterprise Services Ramon Jocson said the programmer processed the transactions immediately, before sending a request from her supervisor.

"What she did was maybe because of expediency," Jocson told a Senate hearing Wednesday.

The bank executive did not identify the programmer, but said she had been reassigned to another department while the fiasco is under investigation.

The bank told the Senate panel some 1.5 million clients were affected by the processing error.

BPI President and CEO Cezar P. Consing said some 1.5 million clients out of their total 8 million clients were affected by the error in its processing.

Senator Francis Escudero, who chairs the Senate Committee on Banks, Financial Institutions and Currencies, was compelled to call for a hearing after another bank, BDO Unibank Inc., issued a statement last Friday that its ATMs were potentially compromised – less than two weeks after the BPI incident was made public.

BPI suspended access to its electronic channels on June 7 as an internal error caused double-posting of transactions – from April 27 to May 2 – starting June 6.

The clients of BDO noted there were unauthorized withdrawals from their accounts.

According to the bank's initial report to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the incident was caused by a "localized skimming attack."