As they promised, the hacktivists resumed their operations

Dec 13, 2012 08:26 GMT  ·  By

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters have resumed their operations. At the beginning of the week, they announced a number of five targets and, it appears, at least four of them have already been attacked.

According to BankInfo Security, SunTrust has suffered some intermittent outages. In addition, some Bank of America and PNC customers have reported having problems in accessing their accounts.

“This potential threat could result in a high volume of electronic traffic that may make it difficult for our customers to log onto online banking,” PNC wrote on its website yesterday.

“Please be assured that PNC's website is protected by sophisticated encryption strategies that shield customer information and accounts. We have no information regarding timing, duration or intensity of this potential threat.”

Hilf-ol-fozoul informs that, yesterday, the website of US Bank was also inaccessible at times.

The financial institutions say that they’ve been monitoring their systems ever since the hackers revealed their plans to launch a new series of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.

The affected banks’ representatives highlight the fact that such attacks don’t affect customer data or funds. Instead, they simply cause disruptions that prevent users from accessing their accounts via the Web.

On the other hand, in a recent interview we’ve had with members of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, they claimed that the role of the warnings they issued before attacking bank websites was to let people know that the sites might be unavailable.

“The reason why we previously warned the people was for their welfare and to make daily schedule for them possible,” they said.

In their last statement, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters warned that the attacks would be intensified until the Innocence of Muslims movie was removed from the Internet.