Six major American banks were hit in a wave of computer attacks last week, by a bunch claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Frustrated customers of Bank of America
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], JPMorgan Chase
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], Citigroup
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], U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and PNC , who couldn?t get access to their accounts or pay bills online, were upset since the banks had not explained clearly what was occurring.
?It was probably the least impressive corporate presentation of bad news I?ve ever seen,? said Paul Downs, a small-business owner in Bridgeport, Pa. ?This is terribly disconcerting.?
The banks suffered denial of service attacks, wherein hackers barrage a website with traffic until it?s overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, aren?t technically sophisticated and don?t affect a company?s computer network ? or, for this reason, funds or customer bank accounts. But they?re enough to upset customers.
A hacker group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters ? a connection with Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers within the Middle East inside the 1920s and 1930s ? took credit for the attacks in online posts.
The group said it had attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad. It also pledged to continue to attack American credit and fiscal institutions daily, and probably institutions in France, Israel and Britain, until the video is taken offline. The recent York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were also targeted.
On Friday, PNC
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] became the most recent bank to experience delays and fall offline. Customers said that they had been unable to get access to PNC?s online banking site, and those who visited the bank?s physical locations were told it was because PNC, etc, have been hacked.
Fred Solomon, a PNC spokesman, said Friday afternoon that the bank?s Site was back online, but that it was still working to revive online bill payment. Asked why the bank was not better capable of withstand such an attack, he said that while PNC had systems in place to avoid delays and disruption from hacker attacks, for this reason ?the volume of traffic was unprecedented.?
Representatives for other banks also confirmed they?d experienced slow Internet performance and intermittent downtime as a result of an unusually high volume of traffic.
Security researchers said the attack methods were too basic to have taken such a lot of American bank sites offline. The hackers seemed to be enlisting volunteers for the attacks with messages on various sites. On one blog, they called on people to go to two Web addresses that might cause their computers to flood banks with hundreds of knowledge requests a second. They asked volunteers to attack banks in accordance with a timetable: Wells Fargo
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] on Tuesday, U.S. Bancorp
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] on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.
But experts said it seemed implausible that this technique would create an attack of this scale. ?The collection of users you might want to break those targets is extremely high,? said Jaime Blasco, a safety researcher at AlienVault who was investigating the attacks. ?They have to have had help from other sources.?
Those sources, Mr. Blasco said, would need to be a collection with money, like a nation, or botnets ? networks of infected computers that do the bidding of criminals. Botnets could be rented through black market schemes which might be common inside the Internet underground, or lent out by criminals or governments.
Last week, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview on C-Span that he believed Iran?s government had sponsored the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions. The hacker group rejected that claim. In a web based post, it said the attacks had not been sponsored by a rustic and that its members ?strongly reject the yank officials? insidious attempts to deceive public opinion.?
The hackers maintained that they were retaliating for the net video. ?Insult to the prophet isn?t always acceptable, especially when it?s the last Prophet Muhammad,? they wrote.
It is amazingly difficult to track such attacks back to a selected country, security experts say, because they are often routed through different Internet addresses to mask their true origin.
But experts said they?d seen a rise in such activity from Iran and inside the choice of so-called hacktivists, hackers who attack for political purposes as opposed to for profit, based in Iran.
?We absolutely have seen more activity from the center East, and especially Iran was increasingly active as they building up their cyber capabilities,? said George Kurtz, the president of CrowdStrike, a working laptop or computer security company, and previous chief technology officer at McAfee. ?There can also be a robust activist movement underfoot, which have to be concerning to many large companies. The threat is real, and what we?re seeing now?s only the end of the iceberg.?
James A. Lewis, a working laptop or computer security expert on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that during this example, the attack methods used were ?pretty basic? to were state-sponsored. But he added that even though the attacks weren?t the work of Iran?s government, the state will be privy to them because Iran monitors its networks extensively.
For Mr. Downs, the small-business owner in Pennsylvania, such half explanations were of little consolation.
?A major bank has an issue and offers no indication of what is happening, when it started or when it?ll stop,? he said. ?That?s pretty freaky if it is your own business?s money and also you deserve to do things with it.? (Read More: Cyberattacks at the Rise)
This story originally appeared within the Manhattan Times
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Tags:banks, denial of service attacks
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