Lloyds Internet Banking Outage ‘Caused By DDoS’

Cybercriminals staging massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attackers were responsible for an outage at Lloyds Banking Group that left customers unable to access online banking services for a three day period earlier this month, according to the FT.

Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland were all affected, as was TSB which uses the same platform but is not part of the group, due to an unspecified IT failure. Other banks were also targeted, but only those on the Lloyds platform experienced disruption.

Customer details were not breached during the assault and no money was stolen.

Lloyds Bank DDoS

Silicon understands that reports of a DDoS attack are accurate, but Lloyds has declined to comment on the possible causes of the outage.

“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,” said a spokesperson.

“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. We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues.”

Because of the valuable information they possess, and because of the importance of their online services, banks are a prime target for cybercriminals and therefore invest significantly in defences. But cybercriminals are not the only threat as faults affect services too.

In fact, Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) customers have suffered more from glitches in recent years. Payment faults, mobile app outages and catastrophic IT failures have all afflicted the organisation in the past.

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