Lloyds Bank outage: DDoS is prime suspect

9 upvotes but ...

... Mrs Uk_Gadget clearly reads El Reg

Re: To DDoS or not to DDoS?

Maybe they are taking the position that they want to know if anything untoward has taken place before saying anything.

Last thing they want is to say "it was only a ddos attack, no problems here" and then have to retract that because a real hack took place.

There could be other similar reasons too.

Re: To DDoS or not to DDoS?

Not wanting to know is worse. Because it's stupid. It will also kick you in the nuts, from behind, when you least expect it, wearing boots with steel caps.

Re: DDOS as a cover for intrusion?

Because it doesn't really make much sense to do it that way, tbh.

The secret to a successful hack is to get in undetected and then spend months or years extracting information. A DDoS doesn't help with either of these things, while also flooding so much traffic into the target system that you kill your own extraction mechanism and drawing lots of attention from infosec professionals - exactly the stuff which you want to avoid, really.

Generally, if you've hacked a system, you've done it silently months ago and either want to just take the stolen data quietly (to prevent useful stolen card info being quickly cancelled by the target), or you can implement something much more effective than a DDoS for ransom purposes ('hey, we encrypted everything on your netapps and now we want you to give us X money for the key').

DDoSes are what you do if you're not very capable, which is why script kiddies like them so much but serious 'most wanted' hackers ignore them. They rely on using off-the-shelf bot software to compromise unsecure computers for generating traffic because botmasters generally aren't capable of breaching even basic security directly, and so need to rely on threatening to force the target offline rather than extracting information.

It was the National Cyber Security Centre that blabbed to the press.

Re: Rumour mill

Naw, nothing so modern as that! Their computer broke one of the wires on his abacus spilling beads everywhere. When he tried to retrieve them he slipped and fell, knocking over his inkwell and spilling ink all over the ledger.