Anonymous Attacks Bank of America

Anonymous has launched a distributed denial of service attack against Bank of America, after the US-based financial giant banned transactions destined for WikiLeaks.

About two weeks ago, Bank of America (BoA) joined the list of companies boycotting WikiLeaks by announcing that it will block all transactions suspected to be related to the whistleblower organization.

Other companies that restricted WikiLeaks' ability to receive donations from supporters worldwide are PayPal, MasterCard and VISA.

Because of their decisions, all of these organizations became the target of coordinated DDoS attacks launched by members of Anonymous, a notorious group of hacktivists.

It was fair to expect that Bank of America will have the same fate, but with Christmas quickly approaching and some Anons giving up DDoS in favor of other means of protest, any action against the bank was postponed.

Nevertheless, the matter has been discussed for the past week between the group regular members. Some agreed to the DDoS proposal, some thought it was pointless and others believed it was too fast.

In the end, a DDoS effort was scheduled to start yesterday and it did, but as some previously predicted, a lack of organization failed to cause any major problems for Bank of America.

Infosec Island reports the primary impediment being technical issues with the "hive mind" feature of the LOIC DDoS tool, which normally forces the user's computer to join a voluntary botnet.

Users had to resort to filling in the target details manually and not all of them managed to do it. Even so, the Bank of America website experienced slowdowns and even went offline for short periods of time.

The force of the attacks is expected to increase as the hive mind problem gets resolved and more members return from the Christmas holiday to join the effort.