Websites belonging to British bank and financial services company HSBC are back online today after reportedly experiencing a denial of service (DoS) attack. The attack, which lasted approximately 10 hours last night, was deemed a “large scale denial of service attack” by the company.
“On 18 October 2012 HSBC servers came under a denial of service attack which affected a number of HSBC websites around the world,” reads a press release today.
The sites were brought offline yesterday afternoon but brought back online at 3 a.m. UK time, according to a post on the bank’s Twitter feed.
While the bank insists that no customer data or accounts were affected, going forward, HSBC reports it will work with law enforcement along with any other organizations that may have also been affected by “such criminal acts.”
Fawkes Security, an offshoot of hacktivist group Anonymous, quickly took credit for the attack, acknowledging the takedown in posts yesterday afternoon on Twitter and Pastebin. The group claimed to have knocked HSBC’s main site, along with its US, UK and Canadian counterparts offline and on Friday, claimed it logged 20,000 debit card details from the site while it was down.
