Lloyds Banking Group was reportedly the victim of a cyberattack two weeks ago that hurt online services.
According to a report by American Banker, citing a person with knowledge of the matter, the bank was hit by a denial-of-service attack, which tries to bring down a website by flooding it with traffic. Lloyds used geo-blocking to prevent the web requests to the servers and scrubbing techniques to keep incoming data clean.
According to the report, the attack on Lloyds comes at a time when U.K.’s largest banks are being impacted by a series of outages, some due to old software and others because of hackers. That, in turn, has resulted in lawmakers calling on companies to spend more on technology and for closer supervision of the computer networks by members of the companies’ boards, noted the report. The Bank of England, for its part, said cybercrime is a real threat to the ability of the banking system to operate.
“We had a normal service in place for the vast majority of this period, and only a small number of customers experienced problems,” Lloyds said in an emailed statement, according to the report. “We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues.”
Denial-of-service attacks are pretty common these days, but a lot of banks won’t say publicly if they have been the victim of one. After all, their reputation is everything when it comes to where consumers are storing their money, mortgages and retirement savings. Last year, HSBC bucked the trend when it announced it was the target of a denial-of-service attack that created headaches for some of its U.K. customers.