ForHacSec

There has been an unusual amount of banking downtime this week in the UK. Firstly with HSBC ATM and point of sale terminals being affected. preventing their customers with-drawing cash from ATM’s and making debit card transactions at the till and online. Followed swiftly by Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) following apparent ‘planned maintenance’.

As with any kind of mass downtime with organisations of this size it leads to a number conspiracy theories as appose to it simply be accepted as ‘coincidence’.

Although I will admit it does have me wondering at times.

For example it has been well reported in the news of late that both theUK and US have ‘apparently’ traced cyber-attacks back to the middle east -China. Whilst over recent months HSBC introduced a new ‘one time password’ access control system for it’s customers to access there online accounts and make fund transfers more surely using there new ‘Secure Key Technology’.

What’s interesting is that on the back of these ‘Secure Keys’ it states ‘Made in China’. Granted, HSBC is the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. It would not be surprising if HSBC-UK had failed to make the appropriate checks to ensure these devices and the associated back end systems were not some kind of Trojan Horse or even if the UK branch of HSBC had this forced upon them. It would also not be surprising to find other banking intuitions in the UK to have implemented similar security measures but also fail to make the appropriate checks with equipment ‘Made inChina’. Such as with the recent Natwest and RBS outage in the same week as HSBC.