14 DAY TRIAL // Another series of websites owned by financial institutions have been disrupted this week by Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters as part of the ongoing Operation Ababil.
Earlier this week, the hackers launched distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against the websites of BB&T and JP Morgan Chase. According to reports, PNC’s and Bank of America's websites were disrupted on Thursday.
Vice President and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research Avivah Litan has revealed that this week’s attacks could have been much worse.
Apparently, on Tuesday, the total size of the attack was 190 GB at one time. The largest attack against one single financial institutions was measured at 110 GB.
However, it turns out that the attacks could have been much more damaging because the hackers only used 3,200 of the 9,200 bots they had.
“Reportedly, no single bot was used to attack more than one bank. So different bots were allocated for different banks, which is very different than the attack strategy employed when this whole thing started where all 3000 bots were used to attack all the banks that were targeted,” Litan noted.
“Shifting cyberwar strategies. I wonder what’s going on on the U.S. side. I wonder if the U.S. government is about to launch a counterattack. This whole mess could get a lot messier. It seems to me like an unending losing battle for more bandwidth. We need a paradigm shift in how we secure our websites,” she added.
The expert advises bank customers to keep a close eye on their bank accounts while such attacks are taking place.
While the Cyber Fighters don’t appear to be after any financial gain and while banks keep reporting that customer information is not compromised in the attacks, it’s believed that another gang is launching lower-level DDOS attacks to cover up fraud attempts.