HSBC said Friday that it has been the victim of a cyberattack that temporarily crippled its personal banking services in the U.K., The Guardian reports.
The bank says it successfully defended its systems against the attack and that customer transactions were not affected. The blackout was caused by a so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack, in which hackers bombard a website with phony traffic, causing it to crash.
{mosads}“We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed,” HSBC said.
The outage is the second time this month customers have been locked out of HSBC’s online banking services.
Despite rampant speculation at the time, the first blackout was caused by a technical glitch, not a cyberattack, according to the bank.
Banks continue to be prime targets for cyber criminals and activist hackers, raising nerves when outages occur.
Researchers in May uncovered Russian cyber-gang plots to hit top banks around the world, including Bank of America and TD Bank in the U.S.
In July, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) went down for nearly four hours, suspending trading and putting many on edge. The exchange later blamed a software update gone awry for the outage.