The websites of major U.S. banks are facing a new round of cyber attacks linked to the same group responsible for similar assaults earlier this year.
The latest attacks started last week and have hit Bank of America Corp., SunTrust Banks Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo & Co. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc., according to two executives at companies providing security to some of the targeted banks, who asked for anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss clients and didn't want their companies to become targets of computer assaults. PNC was under attack Thursday, the executives said.
A group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters announced plans to attack banks in a Dec. 10 statement posted on the website pastebin.com. The same group claimed responsibility for a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in September and October that flooded bank websites with Internet traffic and caused disruptions and slowdowns for online customers.
"The purpose of it is to try to disrupt or stop online banking access," said Bill Nelson, president of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which disseminates cyber threat information to the financial services industry.
"There are some outages occasionally, but it hasn't prevented customers from transacting business."
The Izz ad-Din group has said in Internet postings that the cyber attacks are in response to a video uploaded to Google Inc.'s YouTube ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad and offending some Muslims.
Comments