Gartner's Avivah Litan shares some insight on the recent attacks

Oct 10, 2012 07:13 GMT  ·  By
Gartner's Aviva Litan shares some insight on the latest DDOS attacks on US banks
   Gartner's Aviva Litan shares some insight on the latest DDOS attacks on US banks

Yesterday, hackers part of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters have resumed their operations against US banks by launching a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against the website of Capital One.

Avivah Litan, vice president distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, reveals that authorities have already located the servers utilized by the attackers to disrupt the financial institutions’ websites, but they have yet to identify the hackers or trace their location.

“I personally take these very seriously. In speaking with others closer to the situation, it appears the hacktivists are voluntarily stopping their attacks and taking breathers so that they don’t get caught,” Litan explained.

An unnamed researcher has apparently told the analyst that these DDOS attacks are conducted with the same tools that were utilized back in January 2012 to disrupt the websites of El Al airlines and the Israeli stock exchange.

According to “anecdotal accounts,” fraudsters have already leveraged these attacks to illegally transfer money from the customers of the affected institutions.

They rely on the fact that the banks’ support centers are flooded with calls from individuals who can’t access the online services. In order to be able to handle the extra volume of work, “untrained” staffers are also called in.

This makes it easier for the crooks to trick bank employees into approving over-the-phone wire transfers.

“Call center security is much weaker than web security. Now would be a good time to change that,” Litan concluded.

SunTrust and Regions have already been appointed as being the upcoming targets. It remains to be seen if they will be able to mitigate the attacks now that they know they’re about to be hit.

On the other hand, US Bank and PNC were also warned and they were still unable to maintain their systems online during the attacks.