PGO conducts search in PrivatBank HQ probing customer data leak to Russia - journalist

At the same time, Dubinsky stressed that the bank’s press service named another reason for the search – they claimed that the prosecutor allegedly probed loans to companies related to previous owners.

"The situation in PrivatBank is getting ridiculous. After the report that the PGO conducts a search in PB’s headquarters, the bank's press service (Oleh Serga) publishes a statement claiming that they are searching for something related to the previous shareholders. Merely a few minutes later it turns out that the prosecutor's office was seizing documents related to the leak to Russia of the bank’s database of clients, which took place in September this year," the journalist wrote.

Dubinsky recalls that the National Bank had hired the Moscow-based detective agency Kroll to audit transactions of legal entities in the bank.

Read alsoUkrainian authorities deny biometric passport database leakEarlier, the media reported that the PrivatBank servers had been hacked earlier in September, and personal data of customers was leaked to Russia. Journalists got at their disposal several screenshots of internal correspondence between the Bank’s IT security staff. In their chat they discussed the breach of servers and client data download to external servers.

The data leak occurred on September 12. The first reports to the IT security staff come at 8:42, and for almost an hour and a half, they cannot take a decision on interrupting the download because there could not contact their supervisors. At 10:09 one of the employees writes to colleagues that the downloadable file includes data on birthdays, phone numbers and plenty of other data. At the same time, the IT security staff recorded that the data were leaking to the servers registered in Russia.

Read alsoPanamagate-2: journalists worldwide publish "Paradise Papers"They manage to contact their manager only at 10:29, and the latter instructs them to "cut the download", but by that time all the files had already been copied and withdrawn from the bank.

UNIAN memo. PrivatBank (based in Dnipro) has been operating in the Ukrainian market since 1992 and is the largest bank in terms of assets. On December 18, 2016, the Cabinet of Ministers decided to nationalize the bank, guided by the outcome of the meeting of the National Security and Defense Council on the proposal of the National Bank of Ukraine.