Lloyds Bank Encounters Two Day Long DOS Assault

The Lloyds group of banks encountered a massive online assault spanning a 2-day period as cyber-crooks tried blocking 20m accounts from being accessed. The DOS (denial of service) assault lasted from January 11 to January 13, 2017 when Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax received millions of false queries so the group's computers could be grinded to a shutdown. Normally when cyber-criminals launch a denial-of-service assault they demand huge ransoms for getting deposited in Bitcoins, before stopping the assault; but the latest attack didn't compromise or hack any account, while Lloyds too didn't make any ransom payment.

Within one cat-and-mouse game, Lloyds' IT security specialists 'geo-blocked' the assault's origin that likely arrived from any place on earth. While this actually produces one portcullis for the server that executes the assaults, it as well prevents genuine consumer queries from the same region. Thereafter, the cyber-crooks shift target on another server, while it means the restart of the 'geo-blocking' activity. Newsfactor posted this, January 23, 2017.

The geo-blocking, however, explains the interruption in service from Lloyds while the DOS assault ran, with a few accountholders complaining it was not possible to log on, although the lot of others got usual service.

And even as Lloyds wouldn't say anything regarding the assault's specific form, it stated that the banking institution was experiencing interrupted service problems in respect of its online banking during Wednesday-Friday of the week of 9th for which it regretted the inconvenience caused.

Lloyds further stated that it provided a normal functioning during most of the period concerned while merely a few accountholders suffered problems. Within the majority of instances where accountholders tried another login, access to their A/Cs was possible. The bank said it wouldn't conjecture on what caused the interruption problems.

The Lloyds event is merely months after one even grave cyber theft at Tesco Bank the time crooks executed one unprecedented assault against Internet banking accounts that led to the theft of 2.5m pounds out of some 9,000 A/Cs.

Many other prominent banks in Britain were down with service outages during 2015-16 when they received overwhelming fake requests on their systems.

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