By
NICOLE PERLROTH,
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.
