Phishers keen on relieving Westpac customers of their online banking details are exploiting the "hardware problems" which have been cited by Australia's fourth largest bank to explain outages.
On its Web site, Westpac today posted an alert, warning customers to beware of a hoax e-mail that asks recipients to "review" their account details because the bank has experienced hardware problems.
Westpac has previously blamed "hardware problems" after experiencing an outage in its online banking services.
Last October, Westpac's customers experienced severe disruption when "multiple hardware failures" hit the bank's IT systems over a four-day period.
When Westpac's 16,500 Automatic Teller Machines, EFTPOS network, online banking and several bank branches were crippled by a power outage in June, Westpac pointed the finger at IBM.
Shortly after, Westpac said it would bump up security measures after being hit by a DoS attack.
