New Zealand suffers week-plus denial-of-service attack

The problem has lasted more than a week and access to the digital services is currently intermittent.

“Some customers may be able to access our services and some may have issues from time to time. We’re continuing to work on this as our priority,” the bank was quoted as saying by local media.

Acknowledging the challenges and frustration faced by customers, Kiwibank added: “We really do appreciate the patience and support you have shown while we work around-the-clock to get our services back up and running.”

The bank is one of the country’s major organisations which have faced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, Others include the ANZ bank, country’s police service, New Zealand’s postal service (NZ Post) and the weather forecasting service.

NZ Post took its service offline on 9 September as a result of “some issues at one of our third-party IT suppliers”.

In a DDoS attack, hackers overwhelm a site with thousands or millions of bots trying to connect to it at once, rendering it inaccessible. There is no element of breaking into servers, stealing data or taking money from a bank customer’s account.