We read about and discuss cyber-warfare as if it’s some futuristic threat that may strike some day.
Not so for thousands of HSBC customers who found access to their online account suddenly offline at the end of January in an outage that lasted most of the day.
HSBC have since reported they were defending against a DDOS attack and are now working with the police to catch those behind the attack.
A DDOS attack is a ‘distributed denial of service’, which in short means attackers bombard a website address with simultaneous requests in an effort to overwhelm the website with so much traffic that it stops working.
However, personal and business users need to be aware that the bombardment is not being sent from a single location but from millions of malware infected PC’s operating under the control of the attackers, PC’s that could well be yours and running in your business!
Weak firewall’s are an easy target for attackers looking to spread malware for use in a global attack, but what’s interesting in a DDOS attack is that the malware infection is not being used against the host PC or business but against a third party, in this case HSBC.
More about the story here. www.reuters.com/article/hsbc
The reality is that cyber-warfare is here now. Attacks are happening everyday and is a reason why business owners should take seriously consideration over the quality of their network firewall and anti-malware solutions and play their part in keeping British business safe.
