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Police seek St George's website hacker
From: William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 03:31:45 -0500
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,1150199%255E421,00.html By Andrew White 01 sep 2000 POLICE are investigating what could be the first Australian case of internet hacking, designed to jam popular ecommerce sites, after thousands of St George Bank customers were denied access to its online banking service. The bank brought in a team of technical experts to try to fix the problem that emerged this week when users found difficulty accessing the service. St George spokesman Adam Cooke said the bank started notifying its 120,000 online customers of the problem yesterday after attempts to fix the problem failed. An email to customers from St George's chief information officer, John Lobenstein, said the bank believed the problem was caused by "an external party". But he insisted the security of the bank's computer system had "not been compromised in any way". "We have absolute confidence that the robustness of St George's internet security systems will continue to provide this protection," he said. Mr Cooke said the bank guaranteed that account details of customers had not been compromised. "It is no fault of ours. We are an innocent victim," he said. The problem is believed to be a denial of service similar to attacks on popular websites Yahoo! eBay and CNN.com in February that cost millions of dollars in ecommerce revenue. It is caused by a computer user placing tools in middleman computers. These are then remotely directed to bombard victim sites with fake requests that overwhelm the system and block access by legitimate users. In April, police arrested a 15-year-old Canadian boy using the internet logon Mafiaboy and charged him with the attacks. NSW police confirmed they were investigating but would not provide further details. Mr Cooke said the bank did not know of any suspects or possible motives for the attack. The bank last week announced 900 redundancies or 9.5 per cent of its workforce as part of a radical overhaul of its operations. Asked if the attacks might have come from a disgruntled employee, Mr Cooke said: "I don't think so." *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ================================================================ C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".
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