New Zealand Postal And Financial Institutions Affected By DDoS Attacks, And Now Temporarily Paralyzed

JAKARTA - The websites of a number of financial institutions in New Zealand and their national postal service were temporarily inactive on Wednesday, September 8. Its officials say they are battling cyber-attacks.

The country's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) said it was aware of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks targeting a number of organizations in the country.

It is "monitoring the situation and working with affected parties where we can", CERT said on its website.

Some of the websites affected by the attack according to local media reports include the sites of New Zealand Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and the NZ Post.

In a Facebook post, ANZ informed customers that they are aware some of them are unable to access online banking services. "Our technology team is working hard to fix this, we apologize for any inconvenience caused", the post reads. An ANZ representative did not immediately return a request for comment from Reuters.

NZ Post said the "intermittent outage" on its website was caused by a problem at one of its third-party suppliers.

Several customers took to social media to report outages at Kiwibank, a small lender partly owned by NZ Post. Kiwibank apologized to customers in a Twitter post and said it was working to fix "intermittent access" to services on its app, internet banking, phone banking, and website.

In a DDoS attack, a high-profile institutional server is jammed with inbound traffic from redundant requests trying to overload the system and drown legitimate requests.

In January, a cyber-attack also led to a serious data breach at New Zealand's central bank, which followed several attacks on New Zealand stock exchange operators a year ago. A group of hackers also targeted a hospital in May.