In January 2017, Lloyds Bank was threatened by a cyber-attack caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS), but it didn’t pay a ransom. The cyber-criminals involved with the incident attempted to block access to 20 million UK accounts. “The denial of service attack ran for two days from Wednesday 11 January to Friday 13 January, as Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland were bombarded with millions of fake requests designed to grind the group’s systems to a halt. Usually in a distributed denial of service attack the criminals demand a large ransom, to be paid in bitcoins, to end the onslaught.” wrote Patrick Collinson in The Guardian on 23rd January 2017.
Ransomware success
Around that time, Proofpoint’s Adenike Cosgrove told Computer Business Review: “Ransomware has proven to be a successful business model with attackers collecting more than $209 million from victims during the first three months of 2016 alone, and the volume of attacks was ten times higher than all of 2015. Ransom amounts have tended to be relatively fixed at $300-$1k per machine. As long as the return on investment remains high for attackers, it seems likely that ransomware will continue to be a significant threat.”
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Published on the Kurtosys Blog on 17th July 2017. Author: Graham Jarvis.


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