Guarantor lender Amigo Loans claims its website has crashed twice in the last month after being targeted by cyber criminals. The loan company's website shut down for several hours after traffic from 16,000 different computers were directed to its website during two distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on Sunday and Monday, June 2 and 3. Amigo says the origin of the attack is 'a mystery', but speculated that lead generation firms responsible for spam phone and text messages could be behind the attacks, which it says were designed to divert potential Amigo customers to commercial rivals

Chief executive James Benamor said increased competition in the loan market outside of mainstream lenders is turning the industry into 'the Wild West'. But in spite of this, Amigo did not report the attacks to police, saying: 'In their experience the police don't have the resources or technical skills to deal with these attacks given their frequency and they're not given any kind of priority or attention.'Mr Benamor said: 'Our website was down for hours and it's not the first time this has happened. 'The lending market is becoming more and more like the Wild West. This activity as got to stop and fast.' Amigo believes that these attacks occurred as a result of a virus that directed computers towards the website simultaneously.

It does not believe that customers who tried to access Amigo were directed to other websites, nor that any personal details of existing customers were taken. Perpetrators of DDOS attacks can also hijack web servers which it then directs towards a single target, as happened in a series of cyber attacks on US financial institutions in 2012......Read more:

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