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Cyber attack on bank hits customers [Evening Times (Glasgow, Scotland)]
[December 07, 2013]

Cyber attack on bank hits customers [Evening Times (Glasgow, Scotland)]


(Evening Times (Glasgow, Scotland) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) ROYAL Bank of Scotland said its websites were victims of a cyber attack that left some customers unable to access their accounts in the group's second computer crash in less than a week.



The group's sites went down for about an hour yesterday and on Thursday evening after a "deliberate" surge in internet traffic aimed at its NatWest website, according to the lender.

It said sites are now back up and running and there was no risk to customers.


A spokeswoman said: "Due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the NatWest website, customers experienced difficulties accessing some of our customer websites.

"This deliberate surge of traffic is commonly known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

"We have taken the appropriate action to restore the affected websites - at no time was there any risk to customers." It comes days after an embarrassing IT failure for the group on the busiest online shopping day of the year.

RBS boss Ross McEwan admitted it had failed to invest properly in systems for decades as he apologised for the glitch on Monday, which left customers of RBS and its NatWest subsidiary unable to use credit and debit cards for three hours, while the banks' websites and smartphone apps were also affected.

It came on so-called Cyber Monday, when retailers expected the highest number of online transactions to take place ahead of Christmas, and prompted a flurry of card users to vent their anger.

RBS said the cyber attack was not related to the issues on Monday, adding that banks around the world are regularly subjected to this type of deliberate attempt to bring systems down and disrupt customer access.

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