HSBC down: Bank’s online banking back up after cyber attack
HSBC today confirmed its online banking is back up following a cyber attack which forced it to go offline yesterday.
HSBC said it had "successfully defended" its systems against a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but was not able to fully restore services immediately as it continued to experience threats.
At the end of what HSBC described as "quite an eventful day", it said customers were able to log-on again from 9pm, after an outage that had started that morning.
"HSBC internet and mobile banking are now fully recovered. Thanks you your patience and again we apologise for the disruption" it said in a tweet.
Yesterday, Treasury Select Committee chairman, Andrew Tyrie, responded to the outage with yet another damning statement about the state of bank's IT systems.
"“Bank IT systems just don’t seem to be up to the job. This leaves bank customers with a substandard service. Every bit as concerning, it could be leaving the banking system, and with it the economy, exposed to the risk of systemic failures," he said.
“Banks should be competing for retail customers to provide the most reliable IT. But, for the most part, they don’t. Until more meaningful competition makes that possible, there is no alternative to regulators cajoling the banks."
“Incidents like these are unacceptably frequent, and sometimes serious. Until this is sorted out, the public will remain more exposed than necessary to the risks of IT banking failures, including delays in paying bills, an inability to obtain their own money, and unauthorised access to their accounts.”