Police seek St George's website hacker

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,1150199%255E421,00.html

By Andrew White
01 sep 2000

POLICE are investigating what could be the first Australian case of
internet hacking, designed to jam popular ecommerce sites, after
thousands of St George Bank customers were denied access to its online
banking service.

The bank brought in a team of technical experts to try to fix the
problem that emerged this week when users found difficulty accessing
the service. St George spokesman Adam Cooke said the bank started
notifying its 120,000 online customers of the problem yesterday after
attempts to fix the problem failed.

An email to customers from St George's chief information officer, John
Lobenstein, said the bank believed the problem was caused by "an
external party". But he insisted the security of the bank's computer
system had "not been compromised in any way".

"We have absolute confidence that the robustness of St George's
internet security systems will continue to provide this protection,"
he said.

Mr Cooke said the bank guaranteed that account details of customers
had not been compromised.

"It is no fault of ours. We are an innocent victim," he said.

The problem is believed to be a denial of service similar to attacks
on popular websites Yahoo! eBay and CNN.com in February that cost
millions of dollars in ecommerce revenue.

It is caused by a computer user placing tools in middleman computers.
These are then remotely directed to bombard victim sites with fake
requests that overwhelm the system and block access by legitimate
users.

In April, police arrested a 15-year-old Canadian boy using the
internet logon Mafiaboy and charged him with the attacks.

NSW police confirmed they were investigating but would not provide
further details.

Mr Cooke said the bank did not know of any suspects or possible
motives for the attack.

The bank last week announced 900 redundancies or 9.5 per cent of its
workforce as part of a radical overhaul of its operations.

Asked if the attacks might have come from a disgruntled employee, Mr
Cooke said: "I don't think so."


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