The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has issued a tender for companies to provide DDoS attack protection services, according to a notice by the Australian government tender system, AusTender.
“The RBA is increasingly reliant on its presence on the internet, both for the retrieval of information and the provision of services to outside customers across the internet. Whilst existing firewall and other security controls provide protection against penetration threats, they are not able to safeguard the RBA against distributed denial of service attacks designed to interrupt the Bank's connection to the internet”, the RBA said in its request for tender. Proposals are due by March 14, 2012.
According to a report by the Australian newspaper, RBA is not issuing the tender in response to any specific DDoS threats, and it has interim DDoS protection in place until the tender is awarded.
However, Australian financial institutions have been the targets of recent DDoS attacks. The ANZ Bank’s online brokerage ETrade was reportedly shut down over the holidays by an extended DDoS attack, and financial planning firm Wealth Focus said that hackers using a DDoS attack attempted to extort money from the firm, according to the newspaper.