On Wednesday, the websites of a number of financial institutions in New Zealand, as well as the country's national postal service, were momentarily unavailable due to a cyber-attack, according to officials. A DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack targeting a number of organizations in the nation has been reported, according to the country's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT).
Minister David Clark, who is in charge of the digital economy and communications, said CERT has informed him that "a number" of organizations have been compromised. “At this time, efforts to ascertain the impact of this incident are ongoing. I won’t get ahead of this process,” Clark said, in a statement. “CERT assures me it is actively engaging with affected parties to understand and monitor the situation.”
CERT's objective is to assist businesses and government agencies on how to respond to and prevent cyber-attacks. It also collaborates with other government institutions and law enforcement, such as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
According to local media sources, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group's (ANZ.AX) New Zealand site and NZ Post were among the websites hit by the attack. ANZ informed clients through Facebook that it was aware that some of them were unable to use online banking services. "Our tech team are working hard to get this fixed, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause," the post said.
The "intermittent interruptions" on NZ Post's website were caused by a problem with one of its third-party suppliers, according to the company. Several Kiwibank clients took to social media to complain outages at the little institution, which is partially controlled by the New Zealand Post. In a Twitter post, Kiwibank apologized to clients and said it was trying to resolve "intermittent access" to its app, online banking, phone banking, and website.
A DDoS assault overloads a website with more traffic than it can manage, causing it to fail. While the identity of the attacker and their motivation are unknown in this case, the goal might be to extract a ransom from the victim in order for the assault to be stopped. During the NZX assault, Minister for Intelligence Agencies Andrew Little expressed the government's advice: Don't pay the ransom.
