Lloyds Bank suffered cyber attack that left thousands of customers locked out of online services
Thousands of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers were locked out of services for two days
CYBER villains left thousands of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers without access to their online banking accounts.
Lloyds Banking Group is now working with cops to track down the criminals.
Britain's largest mortgage lender was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on January 11, which carried on for two days.
The banking group, which has six million customers, said that thousands had been affected by the glitch - but at the time did not disclose the reason behind the problems.
The disruption, which involved bombarding the websites 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.
Such campaigns may be part of attempts to extract ransom from these organisations or part of efforts to distract security teams in order to find other ways to break into an organisation's network in order to grab customer data or steal money from accounts.
Lloyds said it would not speculate on the cause of the attack. No customers suffered any losses.
"Only a small number of customers experienced problems," the bank said in a statement. "In most cases if customers attempted another log in they were able to access their accounts."
Other banks have been hit by service outages in the past two years after their systems were breached by cyber attacks.
In November, hackers stole £2.5 million from 9,000 Tesco Bank customers in what experts said was the first mass hacking of accounts at a western bank.
Banks and regulators have been slammed by MPs who say they are doing enough to improve cyber security.
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