Lloyds Bank Accounts Were Targeted in Online Attack

Cybercriminals tried to block access to 20 million UK accounts of Lloyds Banking Group during 48-hour DDoS attack. Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland were bombarded with millions of fake requests, which usually aim at demanding a ransom from the target. However, the banking group assured that no accounts were hacked or compromised, and it did not pay any ransom. The bank’s IT security experts “geo-blocked” the source of the attack which allowed them to cut out the server launching the attacks, but this also made legitimate customer unable to access the bank too. Once the hackers understood their server was identified, they moved to another one. The bank declined to comment on the specific nature of the attack.

The chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee called for the financial industry to create a single point of responsibility to tackle cyber risks, pointing at the necessity of higher level of scrutiny and accountability for existing arrangements with customers being exposed to the risks of cybercrime.

A few months ago, a much more serious attack targeted Tesco Bank and resulted in the loss of £2.5m from 9,000 accounts. A few other major UK banks have also experienced service outages over the past several years due to DDoS attacks. For example, a year ago, a DDoS attack made HSBC’s Internet banking facility unavailable, but no transactions were affected at the time. Before that, Royal Bank of Scotland admitted that it suffered a hacking attack on its online services when monthly paychecks were arriving in accounts.

The chancellor, Philip Hammond, promised to spend an extra £1.9bn protecting UK online defenses, with out-of-date computer systems being exploited by hackers to target everyone everywhere. This money will support the newly created National Cyber Security Centre under the surveillance agency GCHQ. The chair of the Treasury select committee believes that responsibility for addressing online threats is shared too widely among several bodies, including the Prudential Regulatory Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority and GCHQ. As such, it is probably time to consider a single point of responsibility for online risk in the financial services sector.

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SaM

  From Extratorrent