HDFC Bank Website Asking to "Wait" Before Loading Up the Homepage

Question

I've not noticed this behavior before. When I use the following url:

hdfcbank.com

I see the following for a split second:

And then the homepage loads up. Isn't this a bit suspicious? It happens for the first time every day and subsequent visits on the same day seem to behave normally.

I feel that it is searching for a cookie and upon not finding one, is showing the "wait" message, setting a cookie (with expiry of 24 hours) and then proceeding to the homepage.

If that is not the case I wonder why it happens.

Answer 1

Without looking at the page I'm going to guess it uses the "one page" model.

In other words, there's very little HTML on the page, and the content is dynamically loaded via JavaScript. The idea is that you can get a more "native app" experience, assuming your network connection is fast enough.

Another possibility is that the site needs to load a fairly large and long-running page. Rather than risk you leaving or trying to reload because the page takes longer than you expect, that quick message is displayed nearly instantly and then the heavy, slow page doesn't need to be so fast.

Answer 2

HDFC has enabled Cloudflare's "I'm Under Attack" mode, which acts as a sort of bouncer to prevent malicious traffic from getting to the HDFC servers. While you're waiting at that page, your browser is basically solving a puzzle that throws a few annoying obstacles at would-be attackers. It's not a perfect defense, but it deters attackers who aren't committing many resources, allowing HDFC to focus on the bigger threats.

You can read more about "I'm Under Attack" mode on the CloudFlare announcement blog post about it, or their help page.