14 DAY TRIAL // On Tuesday, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters released another statement to reveal to the world that they would continue attacking US banks. Their last victims for this week appear to be a number of websites owned by HSBC Holding, a UK bank with offices all around the world.
Unlike the previous weeks, when they revealed the names of their targets before attacking them, this week the hacktivists kept that information secret. On Tuesday, they launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against the website of Capital One and on Wednesday, they targeted BB&T.
The sites owned by Capital One and BB&T were temporarily disrupted, but their representatives highlighted the fact that the attacks didn’t affect any of their customers’ data.
On the other hand, with HSBC it appears to be somewhat more serious, since not just their US website has been affected.
“On 18 October 2012 HSBC servers came under a denial of service attack which affected a number of HSBC websites around the world. This denial of service attack did not affect any customer data, but did prevent customers using HSBC online services, including internet banking,” HSBC representatives stated a few hours ago.
“We are taking appropriate action, working hard to restore service. We are pleased to say that some sites are now back up and running. We are cooperating with the relevant authorities and will cooperate with other organisations that have been similarly affected by such criminal acts,” they added.
It’s hard to say which of their sites have been affected, but it’s certain that the ones for the United States (us.bsbc.com) and United Kingdom (hsbc.co.uk) are among them.
At the time of writing, some HSBC customers were still complaining that they couldn’t access some of the institution’s websites.
In the meantime, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters promise to continue their campaign until the Innocence of Muslims video is completely removed from YouTube.