The Royal Bank of Scotland group of banks suffered nearly a fifty minute outage to their on-line banking systems today as a result of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The banks affected included, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), NatWest, and Ulster Bank. A spokesperson from NatWest said in a statement “The issues that some customers experienced accessing on-line banking this morning was due to a surge in internet traffic deliberately directed at the website. At no time was there any risk to customers. Customers experienced issues for around 50 minutes and this has now been resolved.”

It is interesting to see this attack impact banks in the UK just days after an FBI agent in an interview with MarketWatch said that more than a 100 financial companies in the US received threats relating to DDoS attacks since April of this year. These threats were usually accompanied by an extortion demand looking for money to be paid, usually in the form of BitCoins, to prevent the attack from happening. There were no additional details given as to how many of those financial companies actually suffered the threatened DDoS attacks, paid the ransom and had no attacks, paid the ransom but still become victims of the DDoS attack, or indeed simply ignored the demand and had no further interaction with those behind the threats.

Read the Full Article: Source – CSO Online
Browsing Privacy: (CSO Online) – DDoS Attacks Take Down RBS, Ulster Bank, and Natwest Online Systems

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