14 DAY TRIAL // Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters have initiated the fifth week of Operation Ababil 2, the campaign whose purpose is the removal of the Innocence of Muslims movie, which they consider to be an insult.
This week’s first targets are the websites of BB&T, PNC, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Hilf-ol-Fozoul, a publication that has been monitoring the downtimes, reports.
In their latest statement, the hacktivists revealed that they would keep attacking US banks until all instances of the movie were removed from YouTube.
They’ve even created an equation to determine – based on the number of views each instance of the movie has, and other variables – for how long they’ll keep launching distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks.
According to their calculation, the attacks will continue for 169 days, but that’s only if none of the variables changes.
“Cyber-attacks of al-Qassam C.F. in recent weeks showed that despite the high cost of U.S. banks to deal with these attacks, the attacks cannot go under control and are unstoppable,” Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters wrote in their last statement.
“Dissatisfaction of customers of the banking services is increasing, but, by contrast, the banks responsibility about the disruptions of their activities is reducing day by day.”
In the meantime, US intelligence officials insist that the apparently hacktivist operation is just a cover-up for cyberattacks launched by Iran.
The officials have even condemned the White House for treating the attacks as a law enforcement matter, instead of treating them as covert warfare and responding to them accordingly.
Presumably, US President Barack Obama hasn’t taken any action against Iran because of the conciliatory policies toward it.
In the meantime, security firms continue to monitor the attacks that are allegedly used by fraud rings to perform illegal activities.