Amarjit Singh

British banking group HSBC said Friday that its global Internet banking system was hacked but there was no data breach. "On 18 October 2012 HSBC servers came under a denial of service attack which affected a number of HSBC websites around the world," the statement read. "Some sites are now back up and running." The attack did not affect "any customer data" but disrupted the bank's online services, including Internet banking, it said. A distributed denial of service attack means that the system was flooded with incoming messages that crippled it and denied service to legitimate users. Full online service is still being restored, the bank said. Rhonda Lam, spokeswoman of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, Hong Kong's de facto central bank and regulator, said the authority has received a preliminary report from HSBC notifying it of the hacking and it will wait for the full report and follow up with the bank.