Last Friday, HSBC’s online banking website got taken down by a DDoS attack, leaving thousands of customers unable to access its services. Anyone attempting to access their account was receiving an error message that morning reading: “We’d like to apologise to all our customers for Online Banking being unavailable.We know how inconvenient this is and we are doing everything we can to rectify the problem. Please try later.”
This may have been extremely inconvenient for HSBC customers, but a cyber attack on this scale means a field day for Eskenzi PR’s security expert clients. Within only a few minutes of the first reports of the attack, we had issued a link to the breaking news to our clients, asking for comments on the story and advice for those affected. With a story like this, with such a high profile organisation involved, time is most definitely of the essence.
Several clients responded in record time, but it was one of our newest clients, NuData Security, who really cashed in on HSBC’s bad news. We issued commentary from Robert Capps and it wasn’t long before the coverage started rolling in.
By the end of Friday, NuData had obtained coverage in The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and Reuters. Over the course of the weekend, more National hits popped up in print in The Sun and online in the Mail on Sunday.
At the time of writing this blog, NuData Security has obtained 13 pieces of coverage, all in National newspapers or top business publications. It just goes to show that, if you’re on the ball when a huge story breaks, you can end up with fantastic results.
