British bank HSBC said it had successfully repelled a cyber-attack on Friday although online access to banking services was not possible.
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HSBC’s internet banking service was taken offline this morning by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the firm has revealed.
Thousands of the bank’s customers were affected by a blackout on its personal banking online services in Britain during the first week of January.
HSBC apologised and said it is “doing everything” it can to fix the problem after it was “attacked” this morning. It told customers it was working hard to restore service adding: “We apologise for any inconvenience”.
In an update on Twitter, the bank said it was “working closely with law enforcement” to catch those responsible for the attack. On that occasion, it was blamed not on an attack, but rather, on “a complex technical issue within our systems”. As it is payday for a lot of people, this is a very inconvenient time for it to happen.
HSBC’s website was displaying an error message, saying: “Sorry, there appears to be a system problem”.
A denial of service attack happens when hackers attempt to prevent people from using a service by bombarding it with traffic.
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HSBC’s online banking login page now displays a notice which says “We’d like to apologise to all our customers for Online Banking being unavailable”.
