Over the course of the last few days, U.S. banks have been witnessing repeated cyber attacks on their websites. These are essentially distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks which are often used to send a lot of junk traffic towards targeted websites in attempt to overload and crash the servers.
So far, it hasn’t been confirmed as to who are carrying out these attacks. None of the regular culprits, such as Anonymous or AntiSec, has taken responsibility. However, an obscure group of Islamists claimed in an online forum that they had launched the attacks to avenge the controversial movie “Innocence of Muslims.”
Officials investigating the attacks are not satisfied with these claims. They believe that the nature of the attack reveals that someone more organized is behind these, and that some little-known group of youth hackers can’t possibly pull off such a major cyber attack.
The attacks have been launched against a number of U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup. Ever since the attacks were launched, a steady stream of huge traffic is sent towards the banks’ websites to try and crash them.
According to Mike Smith, from web security company Akamai, these attacks are not perpetuated by some individual or a group of individuals. Rather, he believes that the attacks have been launched by a state-actor, possibly supported by Iran as a retaliation to the economic sanctions on it. However, there is no proof to definitively conclude so.
Nonetheless, the attacks seem to have gone slow after a week-long spate and the websites of these banks are once again witnessing normal levels of traffic.
Source: US News
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