9/30/2012

Cyberattacks on Banks Threaten 1st World Security :-)

By  
 New York Times 9/30/12

Six major American banks were hit in a wave of computer attacks last week, by a group claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking.
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 financial institutions daily, and possibly institutions in France, Israel and Britain, until the video is taken offline. The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were also targeted.

Security researchers said the attack methods were too basic to have taken so many American bank sites offline. The hackers appeared to be enlisting volunteers for the attacks with messages on various sites. On one blog, they called on people to visit two Web addresses that would cause their computers to flood banks with hundreds of data requests a second. They asked volunteers to attack banks according to a timetable: Wells Fargo on Tuesday, U.S. Bancorp on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.
But experts said it seemed implausible that this method would create an attack of this scale. “The number of users you need to break those targets is very high,” said Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault who has been investigating the attacks. “They must have had help from other sources.”
Those sources, Mr. Blasco said, would have to be a group with money, like a nation, or botnets — networks of infected computers that do the bidding of criminals. Botnets can be rented through black market schemes that are common in the Internet underground, or lent out by criminals or governments.

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