Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters Launch Week 7 of Operation Ababil 2

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters have initiated week 7 of the campaign called Operation Ababil 2 and once again they insist that the simplest solution to put an end to the cyberattack against US banks is to remove the Innocence of Muslims movie from YouTube.

According to a statement they’ve sent via email to Softpedia, the attacks will continue for another 163 days, or 54 weeks.

However, they highlight that this may change at any time, considering that their equation is based on the number of views, likes and dislikes of each instance of the controversial video.

Interestingly, over the past week, they’ve attacked only three financial institutions: PNC, Fifth Third Bank and Chase.

When Operation Ababil 2 was initiated, experts revealed that the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks were not as intense as the ones from the first phase of the campaign. Now it appears that the number of targets is also decreasing.

This could be linked to the fact that the banks have started implementing better security mechanisms. It could also have something to do with the fact that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has started helping financial institutions in their effort to mitigate the DDOS attacks.

In the meantime, the Iranian Cyber Police (FATA) has launched its own investigation into these attacks after being notified by RSA.

The law enforcement agency’s representatives have examined the DDOS attacks on Citibank and they’ve found that the IPs used by the cybercriminals were associated to servers from Italy and the UK.

Furthermore, they say that Iran is not the culprit in this case, but a victim. The head of FATA, Brigadier General Seyed Kamal Hadianfar, has explained that the computers of Iranian users have also been compromised and used in the attacks against US financial institutions.