Social Media Tells the Story of Capital One Cyber Attacks

The cyber attacks are back (if they were ever gone) — with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks messing up your online banking day. The attacks are bigger and badder than ever, but banks are better at re-routing traffic and getting customers where they need to go and shunting attack traffic off to the side.

DDoS attacks usually present little danger to customer accounts. They simply flood servers with bogus requests, meaning legitimate traffic can’t reach the banks’s servers. In rare cases, DDoS attacks can be screens to cover actual attempts to hack into accounts, but “hacktivist” attacks like those perpetrated by the Al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, tend to not follow this profile.

In other words, the attacks are more customer service issues than actual threats.

Chase and BB&T have said they were hit, and security experts say many more banks were hit as well.

A tweet from Capital One at 11:19 a.m. says in part, “We’re working on resolving access issues. In meantime, if you need assistance, please call number on card/statement.”

And the bank’s Facebook team posted the following around three hours ago (which would be approximately 11 a.m.):

Hey there […], thank you for all of your concern. We are aware that some of our customers are having access problems even though our site is up and running. Please call the number on your card or statement if you need help with anything while we troubleshoot with internet service providers.

It’s interesting to note that for customer service issues such as this, social media offers a better realtime window into what’s happening for customers than the spokespeople for the bank.

UPDATE: Capital One spokesperson Pam Girardo reached out regarding this story.

We did experience a DDOS attack last week.  We have defenses in place and online account access was available for the vast majority of our customers throughout the attack.  These attacks do not put customer private account information at risk or affect accounts in any way.

As for what you are seeing in social media… Our defenses against DDOS traffic sometimes block a small number of legitimate customers from accessing our sites.  Those customers who experience access issues are directed to call the number on their card or statement for assistance. We are working to address this issue and apologize to those customers for the disruption in online service.

Online banking will be a focus of Bank Innovation 2013 next week in San Francisco. Get your invitation here.