Another lender has been the victim of a cyber attack, with Lloyds Banking Group PLC (LON:LLOY) customers reportedly suffering after an online attack lasting two days as criminals attempted to block access to 20 million UK accounts.
According to media reports, Britain's largest mortgage lender was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which started on January 11 and carried on for two days.
The disruption, which involved bombarding the banking group’s websites - which includes lenders Halifax, Bank of Scotland as well as Lloyds Bank - with huge volumes of traffic from multiple systems so they overload a server, left some customers temporarily unable to use services such as checking their balance or sending payments.
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DDoS attacks have become common tools for cyber criminals trying to cripple businesses and organisations with significant online activities.
In a statement, the lender – which last month splashed out £1.9bn for credit cards provider MBNA -said: “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.
“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.”
It added: “We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues.”
Cyber victims …
Other banks have been hit by service outages in the past two years after their systems were breached by cyber attacks.
Last November, Tesco Bank - owned by Britain's biggest retailer Tesco PLC (LON:TSCO) - halted online transactions from all current accounts after money was stolen from 20,000 of them in the country's first such cyber heist.
Several other major British banks have been hit by service outages over the past two years when their systems were flooded with fake requests.
In January last year, HSBC PLC’s (LON:HSBA) internet banking facility was made unavailable following a DDoS attack, but no transactions were affected.
In 2015, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (LON:RBS) suffered a cyber-attack on its online services that left customers struggling to log on for nearly an hour.