Westpac, MetService confirm cyberattacks

Tuesday, 1 September 2020

Westpac has confirmed it was the target of a cyberattack on August 18.

Westpac and MetService have confirmed they were targeted by cyberattacks, joining a growing list of businesses to report attacks in recent days.

A spokesman for Westpac said the bank had successfully repelled a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on August 18.

“A small number of customers may have experienced intermittent issues logging-in for a short period as the attack traffic was managed, but our systems did not go offline. This was resolved quickly.'

Westpac had not been targeted by any DDoS attacks since.

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“As a large organisation, we are regularly targeted by cyber criminals including through DDoS attacks,” he said.

“We have dedicated teams working around the clock to ensure we are always alert to threats and our systems and customers are protected.”

MetService also confirmed its website was hit by a DDoS attack on Tuesday but dealt with it in a 'timely manner', TVNZ reported.

The weather forecaster's websites didn't see any noticeable loss of performance but some people were redirected to its back-up website, a spokesman said.

'The team at MetService remain on the highest alert of any threat, and our service provider has additional resource available to help effectively navigate and mitigate the situation should it escalate.”

University of Auckland department of information systems and operations management associate professor Lech Janczewski said DDoS attacks were one of the most powerful weapons on the internet.

They attacked websites and online services with more traffic than they were able to accommodate, resulting in a site crash, he said.

On Tuesday, TSB and Kiwibank reported outages to their web services, although both attributed the problems to internal issues.

Financial institutions and businesses are on high alert after repeated attacks on the main website for the New Zealand stock exchange operator NZX and media companies.