The Electronic Army
Recently, there have been targeted attacks, on the financial institutions, of the United States. The cybercriminals have deployed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) against the banks websites.
A DDOS attack usually consists of hundreds of thousands of compromised home user computers, which are infected with a bot that is able to be commandeered by a malicious remote user. However, in the latest attacks against the banks, the cybercriminals took control of the compromised servers, and were thus able to flood the banks website with requests designed to crash the site. Normally banks deal with five to ten gigabits of data per second, while being able to handle twenty gigabits of data per second; but these attacks produced fifty to a hundred gigabits of data per second. The attack essentially creates a flood of data requests, which cannot be processed by the web servers, making the targeted website inaccessible.
Interestingly, in this recent cyber bank attacks, the cybercriminals announced that they would be attacking the banks prior to the attack. Operation Ababil called for “Cyber fighters of Izz ad-Din al Qassam”, the military wing of the governing body of the Palestinian Territory to unite in this effort to carry out what they termed a digital Intifada. The attack started with Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange, on September 18, 2012. (Bank of America, is often attacked because people think that it is America’s bank). The next cyber-attack was J.P. Morgan Chase, on September 19.
The cybercriminals said the attacks were in response to a YouTube video, The Real Life of Muhammad, the same video which was initially blamed for the September 11, 2012 attacks on our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were all killed.
Listed below are the successful attacks, each predicted ahead of time, against the financial institutions of the United States:
Tuesday 10/9/2012: attack to Capital One Financial Corp site, capitalone.com Wednesday 10/10/2012: attack to SunTrust Banks, Inc., suntrust.com Thursday 10/11/2012: attack to Regions Financial Corp site, regions.com
These attacks were highly complex and successful, leaving many to believe that they could not have been executed without a government sponsor. The criminals claim to have stopped the attacks to mark Eid al-Adha; however, there is chatter which calls for the next attack to bring down multiple banks at the same time, without prior warning. I advise you to stay informed to stay Connected.
