Cyberattack Victimizes New Zealand Banks, Post Office

New Zealand was briefly the center of the cybersecurity world on Wednesday (Sept. 8), when several financial institutions (FIs) and the national post office were shut down by what government leaders said was a cyberattack.

The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) said it was aware of a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack targeting a number of New Zealand-based organizations, and said on its website that it’s “monitoring the situation and …working with affected parties where we can.”

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group’s New Zealand site and NZ Post were among the sites that were compromised in the alleged cyberattack, according to published reports.

ANZ told customers in a Facebook post on Wednesday morning that it was aware some of them were not able to access online banking services. “Our tech team [is] working hard to get this fixed; we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the post said.

On Wednesday, NZ Post blamed what it called “intermittent disruptions” on its website on an issue with one of its third-party suppliers.

Kiwibank, a small lender partly owned by the NZ Post, apologized to customers in a Twitter post and said it would address what it called “intermittent access” to services in its app, internet banking, phone banking and website. It later asked for customer patience as the service was restored.

We’d like to sincerely thank all our customers for your patience again today. 💚 Our Internet Banking, App, Phone Banking and website have been available most of the afternoon, however our team are continuing to work on some ongoing intermittent issues. (1/3)

— Kiwibank (@KiwibankNZ) September 8, 2021

The New Zealand central bank was victimized by a data breach in January, after several attacks on the NZ stock exchange’s operator last year. Hackers also targeted New Zealand’s hospital networks last year.

Related news: Kaspersky Detects 1.5B IoT Cyberattacks This Year

Global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said last week that it detected 1.5 billion attacks against Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the first half of this year using “honeypots,” software that impersonates a vulnerable device. That’s twice as many IoT-focused attacks as in the first half of 2020.