E-trade securityETrade cyberattack shuts down trading

Over the holiday season, Australia’s second-largest online brokering service, ANZ Bank’s ETrade was hit by a series of cyberattacks, temporarily locking out customers.

In a denial of service attack, the company’s site was bombarded with an avalanche of emails forcing it to shut down its service.

According to an ETrade spokesman, overseas customers were primarily affected whereas Australian users had intermittent access on 19 and 20 December. Some customers began to grow frustrated after they were unable to log in and conduct business for nearly two weeks.

So far the bank has not provided any further details on the attack or why it occurred.

”We experienced some malicious activity that impacted the performance of the ETrade website prior to Christmas,” a spokesman said in a statement.

In an email sent to its customers on 5 January, ETrade wrote, ”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.”
On the same day as ETrade’s email, St. George, a rival Australian bank, announcedthat it had also experienced disruptions and been forced to shut down its online trading service.

St. George said that security on its Directshares online trading website had not been breached and that “customer information, data and funds were not compromised or affected in any way.”
National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank, Australia’s other two major banks, said that they did not experience any attacks on their systems.