By John Leyden for The Register. This
story was reproduced with permission.
Business banking customers logging onto ukbusiness.hsbc.com were
greeted with a notice that the site couldn't be verified because
its certificate had expired. HSBC said the problem persisted for
about a day before it was resolved. It apologised for the glitch,
which it said had no effect on either the integrity or operation of
its website.
"The problem related to a US SSL certificate that expired on 4
March. The certificate enables us to place security messages on our
Business Internet Banking welcome page (for example, warnings of
phishing attacks). The issue was identified on the morning of
Wednesday, 5 March, and the new certificate was installed at 5pm,"
an HSBC spokesman explained.
"Customers who have their browsers configured in a certain way
would have seen the message regarding the certificate expiring, but
despite the message that they could be logging into a website
pretending to be something it was not, this was obviously not the
case. Customers were able to click through and log into their
online banking service. No functionality was affected and there
were no security risks associated with the certificate
expiring."
Forgetting to renew a digital certificate can happen to any
organisation, as Microsoft and Symantec can verify. In such cases a
secure connection can still be established with a site. Such
slip-ups are generally best considered as minor foibles.
However, since banks are always warning customers about the risk
of identity theft, it's only fair to expect them to provide
positive confirmation of their identity online, something HSBC
briefly failed to do. Four Reg readers emailed us about
the HSBC digital certificate slip-up.
The bank apologised for any inconvenience. "Obviously we would
apologise to any customers who were concerned about the message
they saw or inconvenienced in any way," an HSBC spokesman said.
© The Register
2008
