Irish debt office to review security protocols after losing 5 million euros in phishing attack

(Corrects second paragraph to show ISIF is a sovereign development fund, not a sovereign wealth fund)

DUBLIN (Reuters) -Ireland's National Treasury Management Agency, the state body that manages debt and the sovereign wealth fund, will review its security protocols after losing 5 million euros ($5.9 million) in a phishing attack, it said on Monday.

The scam was discovered last week after staff at the 17 billion euro 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 story was first reported by the Irish Daily Mail. 

The NTMA was most recently tasked with running Ireland's new sovereign wealth fund, which the government hopes to grow to around 100 billion euros ($117 billion) 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," Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told the news conference, 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.

($1 = 0.8552 euros)

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Kevin Liffey)