By Tommy Culkin at Oil City News
(Casper, WY) – Hilltop Bank in Casper has taken its banking system offline following a cybersecurity breach this week, leaving online and mobile services disabled for its customers.
Personnel first observed degradation across the bank’s IT infrastructure on Tuesday, Sept. 8, and Hilltop Bank and True Companies representative Bill Salvin said it was later discovered after midnight Wednesday that the disruption was caused by a “cybersecurity incident.”
As a precaution, officials brought all internal banking systems down to isolate the network and protect data, disabling online banking, mobile banking and telephone customer service. Salvin said he was unable to comment on specific details regarding the origin of the incident, such as whether it involved malware, phishing or an external system hack.
Hilltop Bank customers can still use debit cards and withdraw cash from ATMs, with a combined $1,000 daily limit.
Salvin said that any automatic payments scheduled during the outage will not be processed. However, he added that Hilltop Bank will reimburse customers for any late fees incurred due to the service outage.
Salvin also said any paychecks Hilltop Bank customers may receive from their employers won’t show up in their accounts until the issues are resolved.
Maintenance efforts are expected to extend over several days and possibly through the weekend, Salvin said.
“It’s one of those situations where, once it happens and you take everything down, you have to bring it up very carefully to ensure that you’re doing it the right way,” he said. “Because we want to make 100% certain that when we’re back online, we’re back online.”
Salvin added that Hilltop Bank will be sharing updates with customers on Facebook as they become available.
“We’re going to be posting information as it becomes available because we’re still learning things as we go through this,” he said. “We certainly appreciate their forbearance as we work through this very challenging situation. We understand that it is an inconvenience for them, and that it’s frustrating for them.”
(Editor’s Note: Oil City News also provided a follow-up article with an update from Hilltop Bank, which “created a new website to share information and keep bank customers up to date as it works to repair its systems.” That article can be viewed here. “