Standard Bank experienced an upsurge in traffic on its online banking service yesterday, following incorrect media reports claiming that a client`s account had been compromised.
Standard Bank spokesman Erik Larsen says traffic on the bank`s site surged by 50%, to 60 000 unique visitors, many of them checking their accounts to ensure that all was in order. This followed an incorrect report that a Standard Bank client had around R40 000 missing from his account in an incident similar to that reported at Absa.
"As soon as we saw that story carried in the media, we managed to contact the named person and found out he was not one of our clients, but a client of two of the other major commercial banks," Larsen says. The incident apparently happened some time ago.
The report came in the wake of revelations that at least three Absa clients had their personal banking details compromised and as much as R500 000 had been misappropriated from their accounts. Absa is also investigating allegations that possibly another seven accounts could have been compromised through the use of key-logging software.
All the Absa cases occurred in Bellville, a town situated north of Cape Town, and the mistaken media report citing Standard Bank mentioned a man who was also located in Cape Town.
"We saw a spike in use of our account query systems, but calls to our service centre only increased marginally," Larsen says.
The three other major commercial banks, Absa, Nedcor and First National Bank, all report that activity on their Internet banking services is "normal".
Absa director of IT security Richard Peasy says: "We saw a tick-up of activity on Sunday evening after the first reports of our situation was published, but since then all is normal."
Roland Le Seur, head of Internet banking at First National Bank, says: "We are experiencing normal activity with an average of 45 000 log-ons per day."
Nedcor has so far been the least affected of the big banks by the security breach and Lorraine von Hoesslin, head of digital banking, says everything is business as normal.
Since the saga began, the banks have received numerous unsolicited calls from vendors selling security products and all say they will review the offerings on a case-by-case basis.
"We will conduct our evaluations of these offerings in the course of our normal business process," says Le Seur.
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