UK bank, Lloyds are the latest to fall victim to cybercrime. It came to light last week that the banking group had been under siege for two days, however, there has been no reports of theft.
Lloyds Group were the victim of a Denial of Service attack (DDos) that temporarily stopped some of Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland customers accessing their accounts. Customers of TSB were also hit by the attack as they also share the same technology, reports so far claim that no money or data were stolen from any of the affected parties nor were any ransoms demanded or paid during the attack, which is thought to have originated outside of the UK.
A DDos attack, is an online attack that works by harnessing the power of a network of thousands of compromised computers or networked devices, known more commonly as a ‘botnet’. Once this ‘botnet’ has been created, it is then used to then flood a website or systems servers with requests, leaving legitimate traffic unable to access it. Whilst DDos attacks are common, they typically last for a short period of time, Lloyds however lasted just shy of two days and is thought to be the longest DDOs attack the group has ever experienced.
This incident comes just months after the far more serious attack on Tesco Bank, where criminals were able to launch an unprecedented online attack that resulted in over 9,000 accounts to be comprised. Big companies are becoming more and more vulnerable to bigger online attacks, but that is not to say that smaller organisations are not also at risk, last year alone 74% of small organisations in the UK reported a security breach.
Cyber security is becoming increasingly more important to both small and larger businesses with threats being discovered far too regularly. To learn how you can protect your home and business get in touch with us to learn about the Cyber security workshops that we run, contact us on 01684377980.