Bank of Ireland - Banking Systems Failure - Day 12

[fungus]

Sunday Business Post: More Problems with BOI Online banking

A small number of Bank of Ireland customers are still having problems with BOI internet banking almost three after it crashed

Customer support have been briefed on the difficulties

“By hitting CTRL + F5 when on the 365 page, customers can get a current view of our webpage”

[Open_Window]

@xman

@Open Window

Considering the context was there an attack on the Banks major connectivity backbone?

Banks use private networks which cant be attacked from public networks.

You could DDOS their internet banking front end, that’s about it.

I was not ruling out physical attacks, sabotage for instance.

If customers can’t get at their digital records then what about internal access to digital records as well. A window to cover things up or an external sabotage. I think people are not being as broadly cynical as they should with the lack of clarity and assurances from BOI unless I missed this???

I would suggest anyone with a BOI to see this as the final straw and stop patronizing the beast which devours their soul.

[tea_drinker]

There’s nothing to say the IT manager wasn’t sent to a comms room to temporarily pull a fibre cable. This could easily be blamed as a physical fault further upstream. But as even mid sized business have diverse paths (no one fibre cable failure can take the service out) this is reliant on a further failure or a bad config in the network system (not able to use the redundant path). Of course, if your provider (BT / Eircom / whoever) falls utterly on their ass their whole infrastructure (and your fibre pipes) are gone dark.

OTOH I have seen failures where the primary link goes and the second link doesn’t work… because it hasn’t worked in ages and no one checked it.

[yoganmahew]

@tea drinker

There’s nothing to say the IT manager wasn’t sent to a comms room to temporarily pull a fibre cable. This could easily be blamed as a physical fault further upstream. But as even mid sized business have diverse paths (no one fibre cable failure can take the service out) this is reliant on a further failure or a bad config in the network system (not able to use the redundant path). Of course, if your provider (BT / Eircom / whoever) falls utterly on their ass their whole infrastructure (and your fibre pipes) are gone dark.

OTOH I have seen failures where the primary link goes and the second link doesn’t work… because it hasn’t worked in ages and no one checked it.

My understanding is that there were dual balanced fibre cables between data centres. There was an maintenance update which caused a hit on one path and traffic routed to the other path. When the first path came back (a matter of seconds), everything went haywire in the datacentre. The central systems shutdown and wouldn’t come back up all together, so they turned a load of stuff off and brought them up one-by-one (not without difficulty it appears).

This is third hand, but I consider the source reliable in the general terms.

[dowtchaboy]

Australia’s Commonwealth Bank has said the glitch that caused its ATMs to spit out cash yesterday was due to deliberate actions it had taken to restore its prior glitch. Opportunists who fraudulently withdrew wads of cash will be forced to pay off the debt.

About 40 ATMs across Australia were put into an emergency offline mode by the bank so that customers could withdraw cash while it worked to resolve a maintenance glitch.

A 20-year-old Guildford West man and an 18-year-old Northmead man were arrested at a Merrylands ATM in Sydney after they were seen exchanging wads of cash. Both were charged with dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception. The arrests came as hundreds of people were reported to have queued at Commonwealth Bank ATMs across the city as news spread the machines had faulted.

For more on this story, read Commonwealth ATM glitch ‘deliberate’ on ZDNet Australia.

zdnet.com/news/bank-says-glitch-caused-atms-to-spew-cash/6199241?tag=nl.e589
zdnet.com.au/commonwealth-atm-glitch-deliberate-339310536.htm?tag=mantle_skin;content

[jacobmarley]

Am hearing that Bank of Ireland are experiencing delays in getting EFT payments to customer bank accounts today 13/12/12 due to a problem with their computer systems. Have been expecting a payment myself that as of yet has not materialised.

Crap time of the year for this to happen if there really is something to this.

[Puck_may_be_Famous]

@jacobmarley

Am hearing that Bank of Ireland are experiencing delays in getting EFT payments to customer bank accounts today 13/12/12 due to a problem with their computer systems. Have been expecting a payment myself that as of yet has not materialised.

Crap time of the year for this to happen if there really is something to this.

I’m also waiting for a payment today.

[Coles2]

Our banking system simply isn’t fit for purpose. 5 working days to clear a business cheque? 24 hours to put through an EFT? How can that be? And then businesses not accepting cheques or drafts? It just slows everything down and makes it a real pain in the hole to do anything. Bah!

[NegativeEquity]

@Coles2

Our banking system simply isn’t fit for purpose. 5 working days to clear a business cheque? 24 hours to put through an EFT? How can that be? And then businesses not accepting cheques or drafts? It just slows everything down and makes it a real pain in the hole to do anything. Bah!

Pretty much the same way the country is run.

[evilal]

@Coles2

Our banking system simply isn’t fit for purpose. 5 working days to clear a business cheque? 24 hours to put through an EFT? How can that be? And then businesses not accepting cheques or drafts? It just slows everything down and makes it a real pain in the hole to do anything. Bah!

It does not take 24 hours to put through an EFT. They just charge an arm and a leg to do same-day EFTs.

[Coles2]

@evilal

@Coles2

24 hours to put through an EFT? How can that be?

It does not take 24 hours to put through an EFT. They just charge an arm and a leg to do same-day EFTs.

Well, yes, it shouldn’t take more than a few milliseconds to transfer funds electronically, so my question was more along the lines of 'How the fck can they get away with it when it is so disruptive to business?'*.

*“Sir, It’s after 11am. I’m afraid it’s too late now for same day transfer. The money should arrive tomorrow morning”. * Wha?

[owenm]

The back end of many banks run on software systems that were designed in the 70’s and they are very slow to change. Change costs lots of money, even when the change is a roaring success. If it doesn’t go well then it can put them out of business. Most change is affected by layering on new functionality via interfaces to avoid changes to the core legacy systems, also most change is driven out of neccessity - it is neccessary for your current a/c to reflect an ATM withdrawal in near real time to prevent you overdrawing. It is not neccessary for an EFT to go through like this. Also, since most EFT’s are between different banks the systems connecting them are, in my experience, message driven (think email rather than skype) and added to multiple serial queues that are sometimes very long, driven by batches, subject to exceptions and verifications, and affect their daily liquidity to the extent that they often limit the rate of transfer outwards to match the rate inwards.

As for cheques, get real, banks want rid of them and they have no incentive to improve the speed of clearance.

[FirstBass]

But why is Banking 365 so utterly shit?

[room305]

@FirstBass

But why is Banking 365 so utterly shit?

Outsourcing. Clueless management. The usual reasons.

[Bostonorberlin]

@owenm

The back end of many banks run on software systems that were designed in the 70’s and they are very slow to change. Change costs lots of money, even when the change is a roaring success. If it doesn’t go well then it can put them out of business. Most change is affected by layering on new functionality via interfaces to avoid changes to the core legacy systems, also most change is driven out of neccessity - it is neccessary for your current a/c to reflect an ATM withdrawal in near real time to prevent you overdrawing. It is not neccessary for an EFT to go through like this. Also, since most EFT’s are between different banks the systems connecting them are, in my experience, message driven (think email rather than skype) and added to multiple serial queues that are sometimes very long, driven by batches, subject to exceptions and verifications, and affect their daily liquidity to the extent that they often limit the rate of transfer outwards to match the rate inwards.

As for cheques, get real, banks want rid of them and they have no incentive to improve the speed of clearance.

rubbish