LONDON, Nov 13 (Reuters) - China's biggest lender, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, paid a ransom after it was hacked last week, a Lockbit ransomware gang representative said on Monday in a statement which Reuters was unable to independently verify.
ICBC, whose U.S. arm was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted trades in the U.S. Treasury market on Nov. 9, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"They paid a ransom, deal closed," the Lockbit representative told Reuters via Tox, an online messaging app.
The blackout at ICBC's U.S. broker-dealer left it temporarily owing BNY Mellon BK.N $9 billion, an amount many times larger than its net capital.
The hack was so extensive that even corporate email at the firm ceased to function, forcing employees to switch to Google mail, Reuters reported.
"The market is mostly back to normal now," said Zhiwei Ren, a portfolio manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management.
The ransomware attack came at a time of heightened worries about the resiliency of the $26 trillion Treasury market, essential to the plumbing of global finance, and is likely to draw scrutiny from regulators.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury Department did not immediately provide comment on Monday.
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a financial industry cybersecurity group, said financial firms have well-established protocols for sharing information on such incidents.
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