ANZ E*Trade outage actually DDoS attack

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.zdnet.com.au/anz-etrade-outage-actually-ddos-attack-339328984.htm

By Michael Lee
ZDNet.com.au
January 5th, 2012

In the lead-up to the festive season, overseas customers were unable to 
access the trading platform. In order to execute trades they were 
required to contact the bank directly. The Australian Financial Review, 
which first reported the problem, had originally been told that the 
bank's trading platform had not been hit by hackers, but the bank has 
now admitted that this was not the case

ANZ spokesperson Stephen Ries confirmed to ZDNet Australia that the 
platform was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. The 
attack involves several independent, or distributed, computers 
repeatedly making requests for information so as to overwhelm the 
victim's resources, and prevent or hinder its ability to provide 
services to legitimate requests.

"We experienced some malicious activity that impacted the performance of 
the E*Trade website prior to Christmas," he said.

[...]


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