Lloyds Bank reported to be trying to identify who was behind a cyber attack against its banking website

The disruption on 11 January left some customers temporarily unable to check their balance, make online payments or even log in

The UK corporate sector has been marred by several high-profile cases of cyber security breaches in recent years, including at companies like Tesco Bank, TalkTalk and Whetherspoons (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Lloyds Banking Group is working with law enforcement agencies to identify who was behind a cyber attack that caused the group’s personal banking website to suffer temporary outages earlier this month, Reuters reported on Monday, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The group, which includes Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, was the target of a so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on 11 January, which lasted for two days, the agency reported, citing the source.

The disruption, which Reuters said involved bombarding the websites with huge volumes of traffic from multiple systems so they overload a server, left some customers temporarily unable to check their balance, make online payments or even log in.

In a statement to The Independent, a spokesman for Lloyds said: “We experienced intermittent service issues with internet banking between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon the week before last and are sorry for any inconvenience caused. We had a normal service in place for the vast majority of this period and only a small number of customers experienced problems. In most cases if customers attempted another log in they were able to access their accounts. We will not speculate on the cause of these intermittent issues.”

The UK corporate sector has been marred by several high-profile cases of cyber security breaches in recent years, including at companies like Tesco Bank, TalkTalk and Whetherspoons.

Last week, the results of a global study, conducted by job site Indeed, showed that the UK has a serious skills shortage when it comes to cyber security, and that the chasm between supply and demand for expertise is widening at an alarming rate.

The research showed that the number of cyber security roles advertised in the UK was the third highest globally. As a result, employer demand exceeded candidate interest by more than three times, resulting in the biggest skills gap of any country in the world, bar Israel.