St George Bank, Australia's fifth largest bank, said its customers' accounts were safe from a hacker who was clogging up access to the group's Web site on Thursday.
The bank's customers had a tough time getting on to the Web site to do business on their accounts on Thursday because an unknown party was bombarding the site with messages, blocking access for real users.
The bank called it a "denial of service" attack, not an attempt to infiltrate the system. "We know through our systems tracking that no breach of security has occurred and that's guaranteed," said St George Bank spokesman Adam Cooke.
"We're very, very comfortable and very confident that will continue," he told Reuters. A team of experts from the bank and outside experts were helping St George sort out the problem while authorities investigated who was behind the attack.
"We are a victim here, it's being done unto us and we're just trying to resolve it as quickly as possible," said Cooke.
He had no estimate of the costs of lost business caused by the congestion.
The incident had no impact on St George's shares, which were unchanged at AU$11.55 on Thursday, standing up to a 2.28 percent slump in banking and finance stocks.
