Lloyds Banking Group was reportedly hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack lasting two days, significantly disrupting its online banking services.
According to reports, the British financial institution was one of several UK banks targeted by the cyber attacks, which ran from Wednesday, January 11 to Friday, January 13. The Guardian reported Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland were bombarded with millions of fake requests designed to bring down their systems. Customers were left unable to check account balances or make payments; however, no accounts were hacked or compromised during the attacks.
“We experienced intermittent service issues with internet banking between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon the week before last and are sorry for any inconvenience caused,” a Lloyds spokesperson told IBTimes UK.
“We had a normal service in place for the vast majority of this period and only a small number of customers experienced problems. In most cases, if customers attempted another log-in, they were able to access their accounts,” the Lloyds spokesperson said. “We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues,” the spokesperson added. The banking group is said to be working with the National Cyber Security Centre to identify the actors behind the attack. Lloyds is certainly not the first financial institution to fall victim to such disruptive attacks. In November, Tesco Bank was forced to halt all online transactions after cybercriminals successfully stole from 20,000 accounts. The bank repaid roughly £2.5m to 9,000 of its customers.
