A firewall collapsed yesterday, cutting off 20 000 customers from online banking.

JOHANNESSBURG - Standard Bank is the second large bank to have its Web site fail this month, when a firewall collapsed yesterday, making the site unavailable for a few hours.

Earlier this month, First National Bank's site went down for a few days after an upgrade resulted in excess processing volumes and limited the number of clients who could access the service.

Itumeleng Monale, director of self-service banking at Standard Bank, says the site was not hacked, but went down yesterday afternoon due to a firewall failure. She says the Web site was offline between 14.45 and 15.30, when it started going live again. "It was literally a few hours."

Monale explains the bank started moving systems to its disaster recovery site as soon as it became aware the firewall had been compromised. She says this meant that services had to go live one-by-one.

Bad timing

The firewall break was not planned, as the bank does not do maintenance in peak times, Monale adds.

Standard Bank has about 930 000 active online clients, and peak online transaction time is between 8.00 and 9.00, and again at lunch time. Afternoons are not peak times; however, about 20 000 clients usually bank online and visit the Web site during the time the site was down.

Monale says the situation was aggravated by the timing of the outage, which was at month-end. She says the disaster recovery plans worked as they were meant to, and the bank is now trying to identify the cause of the firewall failure.

"It doesn't appear to be a hack attack, and none of our systems were compromised," Monale adds. She apologised to clients who were inconvenienced.

Related stories:
FNB goes offline

FNB back online

This story was first published on ITWeb at http://www.itweb.co.za/sections/internet/2009/0910291040.asp

Intraday

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Maths are us "the Web site was offline between 14.45 and 15.30, when it started going live again. "It was literally a few hours."". Since when is 45 minutes "a few hours"? Do you calculate interest the same way? by Bozo on October 29 2009, 16:06 Find this comment inappropriate? Report it

Standard Bank site falls over I was of line for many hours Had to use telephone to trade and get my info from money web site very annoying when you deal in futures by stuart on October 29 2009, 19:20 Find this comment inappropriate? Report it

Wow!!! an apology from their IT section This is a first. They actually admitted that the IT fault could theirs!!!! No wonder gold and the rand are so volatile. We'll probably have an outbreak of the rinderpest or hurricanes next. I'm sure they'll come up with a . .more better reason why it wasn't their fault. . .less by Standard Bank usere on October 29 2009, 20:03 Find this comment inappropriate? Report it

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