ABSTRACT
HSBC customers were locked out of Internet banking for several hours on January 29, 2016 after the company was targeted by online criminals in a denial-of-service attack. The bank, which has 17 million personal banking and business customers in the United Kingdom, said its website had been attacked. Customers were unable to log in to their accounts until late in the afternoon, on what is likely to have been a busy day for online banking, as many employees received their first pay packet of the year. A denial-of-service attack overwhelms a website with traffic, taking it offline, and is sometimes used as a smokescreen for other attacks. The bank said there were no indications of customer data theft. It was working with the government-backed Computer Emergency Response Team, Cert-UK, to pursue the criminals responsible. This cyber-attack came less than a month after HSBC suffered a systems failure, which stopped customers from using its site and mobile app for two days.
