The official domain of HSBC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) came under massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on 12July affecting domain in UK and the USA.
The DDoS attack was conducted by OurMine hacking group which previously made headlines for hacking social media accounts of high-profile tech celebrities including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai but this is the second DDoS attack after WikiLeaks last week.
Currently, the reason for targeting HSBC bank is unknown though according to SoftPedia the cyber attack was stopped within few hours after one of HSBC’s staffs contacted the attackers. “Hello, We stopped the attack of HSBC Bank! a staff of HSBC Talked with us,” stated the hackers on their official blog.
It is unclear if the bank was targeted for ransom or just for fun, however, this is not the first time when HSBC faced such attacks. In January 2016 hacktivists from New World Hacktivists (NWH) claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack on HSBC’s mobile servers on payday.
As far as OurMine is concerned, it is the same group who hacked Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai Quora account which was also linked to his Twitter account, the group also hacked Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg Twitter and Pinterest accounts and last but not the least the official Twitter account of Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey was also taken over by the same group.
DDoS attacks have been increasing with every passing day. In the past, DDoS attacks were conducted just for fun or to shut down servers but now hackers attack sites for ransom and keep them down until a ransom is paid. The ProtonMail DDoS attack is a fine example of how these attacks are becoming another online mafia to steal money.
At the time of publishing this article, both targeted sites were reachable.
[Source: Hackread]
To see more: https://www.hackread.com/hsbc-website-suffers-ddos-attack/
