Major Banks Biggest Cyberattacks in History

I recently found an article, written by David Goldman of CNN, discussing the denial of services attacks against the banks: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, US Bank, and PNC Bank.  Security experts say the outages stem from one of the biggest cyber-attacks they've ever seen. These "denial of service" attacks -- huge amounts of traffic directed at a website to make it crash -- were the largest ever recorded by a wide margin, according to two researchers. (Goldman, 2012)   These same banks have a great deal of defenses built to prevent such attacks, but Goldman says this time they were outgunned. 

"The volume of traffic sent to these sites is frankly unprecedented," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks. "It's 10 to 20 times the volume that we normally see, and twice the previous record for a denial of service attack."  To carry out the cyberattacks, the attackers got hold of thousands of high-powered application servers and pointed them all at the targeted banks. That overwhelmed Bank of America and Chase's Web servers on Sept. 19, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday.

Goldman writes, denial of service attacks are an effective but unsophisticated tool that doesn't involve any actual hacking. No data was stolen from the banks, and their transactional systems -- like their ATM networks -- remained unaffected. The aim of the attacks was simply to temporarily knock down the banks' public-facing websites. That level of pre-planning is a deviation from the kinds of denial of service attacks launched at banks in the past by so-called "hacktivists." Typically, hacktivists use home PCs infected with malware to amass their botnets. Attacks on this scale would be impossible to carry out with home PCs -- users too frequently turn them off or disconnect them from the Internet.

Cited:

Goldman, David. (2012). CNN: Major Banks hit with biggest cyber-attacks in history. Retrieved at: http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/27/technology/bank-cyberattacks/index.html