Lloyds banking group is the latest lender to suffer an online assault after 20million UK accounts were compromised after fending off two-day denial of service attack. At the time of the attack, the group attributed the breakdown to "technical problems".
The customers had trouble logging in to online accounts during the unsuccessful cyber-attack on 11-13 January 2017. Some customers were still unable to log into their accounts over the weekend. This has been one of the longest DDoS attacks ever.
The bank, which is led by boss Antonio Horta-Osorio and the breakdown of the group also affected Halifax and Bank of Scotland when they were bombarded with millions of fake requests.
Lloyds revealed little at the time of the attack, despite a flood of Twitter complaints.
Usually in a DDOS attack the criminals demand a large ransom, to be paid in bitcoins, to end the onslaught. Customers of TSB, the challenger bank that was spun-out of Lloyds in 2013 and shares its technology, were also hit by sporadic disruption to their internet banking services. However, no money or data were stolen from either Lloyds or TSB and no ransoms were demanded or paid during the attack, which is thought to have originated overseas.
The National Cyber Security Centre is working with the bank on the attack.
The IT security experts at Lloyds “geo-blocked” the source of the attack. This effectively drops a portcullis over the server launching the attacks, but also stops legitimate customer requests from that area too. The cybercriminals then move to another server, and the geo-blocking game begins again.
The DDoS attack, in which criminals flood websites with traffic to slow them down and stop them from working, is just the latest in a stream of cyber assaults on British banks, sparking mounting concern among regulators.
It explains the intermittent nature of the service issues at Lloyds during the period of the attack.
Last November, some £2.5m was stolen from 9,000 customers of Tesco Bank in what was the largest ever hack against a UK lender.
Several other major British banks have been hit by service outages over the past two years when their systems were flooded with fake requests.
The customers had trouble logging in to online accounts during the unsuccessful cyber-attack on 11-13 January 2017. Some customers were still unable to log into their accounts over the weekend. This has been one of the longest DDoS attacks ever.
The bank, which is led by boss Antonio Horta-Osorio and the breakdown of the group also affected Halifax and Bank of Scotland when they were bombarded with millions of fake requests.
Lloyds revealed little at the time of the attack, despite a flood of Twitter complaints.
Usually in a DDOS attack the criminals demand a large ransom, to be paid in bitcoins, to end the onslaught. Customers of TSB, the challenger bank that was spun-out of Lloyds in 2013 and shares its technology, were also hit by sporadic disruption to their internet banking services. However, no money or data were stolen from either Lloyds or TSB and no ransoms were demanded or paid during the attack, which is thought to have originated overseas.
The National Cyber Security Centre is working with the bank on the attack.
The IT security experts at Lloyds “geo-blocked” the source of the attack. This effectively drops a portcullis over the server launching the attacks, but also stops legitimate customer requests from that area too. The cybercriminals then move to another server, and the geo-blocking game begins again.
The DDoS attack, in which criminals flood websites with traffic to slow them down and stop them from working, is just the latest in a stream of cyber assaults on British banks, sparking mounting concern among regulators.
It explains the intermittent nature of the service issues at Lloyds during the period of the attack.
Last November, some £2.5m was stolen from 9,000 customers of Tesco Bank in what was the largest ever hack against a UK lender.
Several other major British banks have been hit by service outages over the past two years when their systems were flooded with fake requests.