Lloyds resists three day cyber onslaught

According to reports, criminals made millions of fake requests to the banking group which includes the Bank of Scotland, Lloyds and Halifax brands.

The barrage was loosed intermittently between Wednesday, January 11 and Friday, January 13.

However, while the assault did prevent some customers from accessing their online accounts, it is believed that the hackers had been aiming to block around 20 million people by using a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that slows down systems by sending fake requests.

In a game of cat and mouse, Lloyds defended its systems using a “geoblocker” that stops all traffic coming to its website from a particular country, but can also prevent customers in that region from accessing their accounts.

While some customers could not log into their digital accounts or experienced a slow online service, the attack did not result in any bank accounts being hacked.

A spokesman for Lloyds Banking Group 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.

“We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues. Lloyds faced a flurry of complaints from customers on social media during the attack, but did not reveal the problems it was facing at the time.”