Commonwealth bank Netbank falls-over. Traffic overload blamed but hacker attack a strong possibility.
Internet banking services at Australia’s largest retail bank, the Commonwealth Bank, have been severely disrupted in recent days and, as we go to press, are still suffering performance issues.
An official spokeswoman said that the issues were mainly the result of a traffic overload at the end of the financial year. She said that Netbank had experienced its busiest day on record.
“We are aware that a number of customers experienced difficulty accessing our NetBank service yesterday. This was due to NetBank experiencing its busiest day on record with the processing of 1.59 million logins over a 24 hour period. The additional volume in traffic was 15 percent above the normal load on Monday and early Tuesday.”
However she also acknowledged that some of the Netbank traffic was of dubious origin, suggesting that NetBank may be the target of a so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) exploit. (This is essentially an attempt by hackers to take a site down by overloading its web-servers.)
“Portions of this traffic were of uncertain origin and needed to be verified.”
Despite claims by some users that Netbank continued to be unavailable as this issue went to press, the spokeswoman said that the service was definitely back online, and had only been down for a short time.
“The NetBank online service issue has been resolved. We maintain our guarantee that no customer will ever be out of pocket due to inability to access our services. The CBA is currently creating further automatic provisioning to support increased traffic loads for peak times and is working to resolve any related customer issues. “
Even so, it is clear that Netbank is continuing to have problems, with transaction histories particularly problematic.
Anyone looking to access their transaction history is advised to use an alternate method for the moment.
“For a temporary time some NetBank customers will need to view past transaction details on their accounts by using the online search facility. The facility can be accessed by clicking on the "Search Transactions" button within the View Accounts -> Transactions tab and conducting a search for a two-week specified date range. The CBA wishes to reassure customers that all account information including balances is correct.
Customers requiring any assistance are advised to call the 24 hour help desk on 13 2221.
Once again we regret any inconvenience that has been caused to our customers."
The problems at Netbank have co-incided with a clear step-up in phishing attacks on the CBA over the past month or so. Even non-customers like us here at eCommerce Report’s have had our email inbox bombarded with phony security messages and requests to log-in purporting to come from the bank.
But whether the problems are a result of a DDOS, the phishing attacks or some other reason, there is little doubt that Netbank customers are extremely unhappy.
Users have flooding Internet forums such as Whirlpool where one thread, begun eleven days ago, now spans 14 pages worth of individual posts.
www.whirlpool.net.au
Similarly, an invitation to comment on the situation at the Sydney Morning Herald’s online service has, over three days, prompted a remarkable 31 pages worth of complaints.
www.smh.com.au
The CBA has set up a special status page to keep customers informed of the current status of the service. As this issue went to press the status page was acknowledging that transaction histories for the last three months are incomplete.
”We have identified that some transactions completed between 27/3 – 29/6 are not displaying on some accounts within NetBank..If you need details of your past transaction history, please use our transaction search feature by following the steps outlined at www.commbank.com.au/searchanswers and use a 14 day date reange.
For more information go to the Netbank status page at:
www.commbank.com.au/personal/netbank/netbank_outage.aspx
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