A Cyber Attack that hit servers of several banking institutions of New Zealand(NZ) has disrupted the online services for over a week now. And although the banking officials say that the issue was resolved within 48 hours, many customers still could not login into the online banking website or app witnessing several issues such as could not contact server or performance issues.
The disruption wasn’t limited to just the banking institutions as several websites were badly hit by a DDoS attack on September 8th,2021 that includes NZ meteorological offices, NZ post offices and NZ Police.
Kiwibank customers were the first to tweet their anger over the digital disruption on Wednesday last week. And the bank issued an apology for the service disruption and disclosed on its Facebook page that they were back by Sunday afternoon, i.e. September 12th,2021.
However, there seem to be some intermittent issues still that need to be solved on an urgent note as several Kiwibank customers could not login into their online accounts to make money transfers and payments even by Monday afternoon falling on September 13,2021
NOTE 1- A Distributed Denial of Service attack aka DDoS attack is a situation where the number of computer bots flood the web servers with fake traffic, leading to server disruption and denial of service to actual web traffic.
NOTE 2- In May this year, a hacking group targeted Waikato District Health Board and accessed and stolen data related to 25,000 patients. Later, they threatened to sell the stolen data files on the dark web that includes phone numbers, names, addresses of patients, staff related info that could lead to digital attacks related to identity theft or brute force attacks.
