ONE of the city’s well-known online investment platforms suffered a denial-of-service (DoS) attack Tuesday afternoon, leaving hundreds of individual investors in a panicked state, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported yesterday. The attack again raised people’s concerns over cybersecurity of online financial services companies.

    Many investors complained they could not access the website of Hongling Capital, my089.com, Tuesday afternoon. Hongling is one of the main peer-to-peer (P2P) online lending sites in Shenzhen.

    “I had problems with the website this morning when trying to make some investments,” said one of Hongling Capital’s clients who refused to be identified. He panicked when he was again denied access to the website in the afternoon.

    He was one of the many users of my089.com who became worried that the company had gone bankrupt and the company executives had fled with their investment money.

    Hongling later confirmed that the company’s website had been attacked by hackers.

    Xiao Guilin, a department manager at Hongling, said the company had shut down its website temporarily to protect the company server, according to the Daily. The website returned to normal three hours after being shut down.

    Xiao confirmed that the attack was a DoS, an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users, which is done in several ways, such as flooding it with requests so that it cannot respond to legitimate ones. It’s a common hacking technique, especially towards businesses. Unlike data breaches, they don’t steal anything, but are expensive headaches for targeted companies.

    “I can assure our customers that their investment funds are safe with us,” said Xiao.

    He said Hongling has been working with an Internet safety solutions provider to reinforce its server against potential attacks.

    Hongling is not the first domestic P2P financial platform to have undergone cyberattack by hackers. According to the Daily, 165 P2P online investment platforms nationwide had been hacked as of November 2014. These include popular Chinese P2P websites like renrendai.com and ppdai.com. Some of the companies suffered great economic losses trying to fix the problem and dealing with fallout from investors over security concerns.

    Hongling is one of the first Chinese companies to provide P2P online financial services. It now has about 350,000 investors with about 20.8 billion yuan (US$3.36 billion) invested.

    (Wei Jie)