14 DAY TRIAL // Miguel-Ángel Rodríguez-Sola, Lloyds Bank Group's Director of Digital, Marketing & Customer Development, has told The Telegraph that his company saw a decline in cyber-attacks of almost 90 percent in the past two months.
Lloyds' head of digital products says the company has heavily invested in cyber-security solutions, declining to name what kind of mitigations they used, but the results were quick to follow, especially after the company saw an increased number of DDoS attacks hitting its infrastructure and that of other banks.
Sola: Attackers moved to other less protected industries
"There had been an increase in the UK in terms of cyber attacks, between June and February this year," Sola told The Telegraph. "However, over the last two months I have had five-times less than at the end of last year."
Sola also told reporters that its company started to collaborate with law enforcement on a regular basis, but he also says criminals were opportunistic enough to move away from a hardened target to something easier to attack.
Sola specifically mentions the UK telecommunications industry, which saw its fair share of cyber-attacks in the past year, starting with the TalkTalk data breach.
UK banks have been under the gun for the past few months
Lloyds Bank has had its share of digital troubles, when last year, hackers stole the personal details of thousands of bank customers. An investigation later revealed that an unknown person took a data storage device containing the sensitive customer details from a data center. The hard drive belonged to RSA (Royal Sun Alliance), one of Lloyds Bank's previous collaborators, who agreed to cover any identity and fraud protection services.
Other English banks didn't fare as well either, and HSBC suffered a massive DDoS attack at the end of January, when most people were busy filing their tax returns and were in dire need to access their bank accounts.
Despite the decrease in cyber-attacks, as part of the Anonymous OpIcarus hacktivism campaign this month, the Bank of England's email server was under a heavy DDoS attack.
If we know anything about cyber-criminals, hackers, and script kiddies, it's that there's nothing more appealing to them than a target bragging about being untouchable, so Sola's remarks may come back to bite him.