The offshore Cyber attack which forced Australia's Second Biggest online broking business , ANZ Bank to shutdown its broking business ETrade, also caused rival bank St George to close its Directshares online broking service.
"The shutdown was prompted by thousands of emails bombarding the broking site, in a denial-of-service attack(DD0S). The lockout was first noticed by ETrade customers trying to access the site overseas, as the bank shut off access to all overseas users. One frustrated customer emailed BusinessDay on December 31, saying that he was trying to prepare a tax return while in the US and Canada and still couldn't access his account." theage report says.
Yesterday only, ETrade informed about the attack to its customers and apologizing for inconvenience.
"You may have experienced issues accessing our website in recent weeks, particularly from overseas," the email said.
"The performance of our website was impacted by external malicious activity in a denial-of-service attack. A denial-of-service attack is where millions of messages are sent to the website in an attempt to disrupt service. As a result, we took the necessary steps to protect our clients and ensure your data remained secure.
"Immediate action was taken to restrict access from some overseas locations, but given the nature of the incident we were restricted in what we could communicate with you at the time. Importantly, at no stage was the security of the Etrade website breached."
According to The Sydney Morning Herald report, Yesterday, St George revealed that its online trading service is provided by Etrade, also affected by this DDOS attack. ETrade shut down the business to various countries from December 19, bringing it back online following risk assessments.
A St George spokesman said the broking service offered by Westpac, Westpac Online Investing, operated on a different system and was not affected.
"At no stage was the security of the Directshares website breached. Customer information, data and funds were not compromised or affected in any way," he said.
"We don't yet know the motivations for the attack or where the attack originated, but we are awaiting further information from external parties who are investigating."
Both National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank told BusinessDay they had not experienced an attack on their systems.