January 29, 2016
HSBC has been hit by a cyber attack causing its personal banking website and mobile application to shut down, only weeks after a systems failure that left thousands of its customers without access to digital services.
The UK bank said it had suffered a “denial of service attack” on Friday morning, which prevented retail customers from accessing online and mobile banking for a number of hours.
A denial of service attack is where a website is swamped with traffic in an attempt to bring it down.
The bank said in a statement that it had “successfully defended against the attack, and customer transactions were not affected.”
However by early afternoon on Friday its online banking services were still unavailable to some customers.