An external attack by organized criminals is being blamed for the fraudulent debit card postings at The People's Federal Credit Union this past weekend.

According to a release, The People's Federal Credit union says authorities determined the postings were a result of computer-generated external attacks.

"After talking with federal authorities today, it was determined TPFCU never experienced any sort of security breach, internally or on any network," General Manager and CEO Art Hornell said. "We were never hacked."

Thieves allegedly used a computer program to generate random debit cards using information that was available to the public about financial institutions. As a result, the criminals were able to pass the numbers off as real cards at merchants in California, Florida and other places.

In order to help prevent this type of attacks, the credit union says in the future they will be denying charges that utilize patterns like it saw last weekend.

"What happened was an unfortunate and difficult situation. However, we are certain that TPFCU will come out of this as an even stronger and safer credit union," Hornell added.