State's debt management agency loses €5m in phishing attack

NTMA says there was no suggestion of an IT breach or that any inside information had been used.

Frank O’Connor, NTMA Chief Executive and Paschal Donohoe TD at the NTMA Mid-Year Business Update 2025. Picture: Chris Bellew / Fennell Photography

Ireland's National Treasury Management Agency, the state body that manages debt and the sovereign wealth fund, will review its security protocols after losing €5m in a phishing attack.

The scam was discovered last week after staff at the €17bn Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF) - a sovereign development fund that the agency also runs - expressed concern about a payment made to what they thought was an investee company.

Instead, it was found that they had received a fraudulent payment request from a third party designed to look like a legitimate request from the existing investee company at the time of an expected drawdown of funds, NTMA Chief Executive Frank O'Connor said at a news conference.

ISIF, which invests in companies that support employment and economic activity in Ireland, has made almost 250 individual investments, many involving several such drawdowns or so-called capital calls, in its 10 years of operation.

"We will have to look hard at our own systems, our own protocols, and the investigation will fully get into that," O'Connor said, adding that the investigation will consider if more controls are needed.

The NTMA has reported the fraudulent payment to the police and said it is seeking to recover the funds. O'Connor said that there was no suggestion of an IT breach at the NTMA or that any inside information had been used on its part.

The NTMA was most recently tasked with running Ireland's new sovereign wealth fund, which the government hopes to grow to around €100bn over the next decade to ease future healthcare, pension and climate costs.

"In my many years of engagement with the National Treasury Management Agency, I have seen at first hand how seriously they take all matters with regard to security," Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said, describing the attack as "regrettable but extremely rare."

Neither O'Connor nor Donohoe discussed who may have been behind the attack, mentioning that they were restricted in what they could say.

Reuters