Wells Fargo became the third major U.S. bank to experience web outages Tuesday, in what’s believed to be the latest in a series of targeted cyber attacks.
According to Reuters, Wells Fargo was hit by a massive “denial of service” attack, in which servers are inundated with so many communications demands that they cease to function properly. The subsequent site shutdown affected more than 21 million Wells Fargo online customers and 8.5 million mobile bankers.
A group calling itself the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters posted in Pastebin.com, claiming responsibility for the Wells Fargo attack and for causing the other outages recently experienced by major banks.
Last week, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase each saw significant outages of their own, causing the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) to raise the Cyber Threat level from “Elevated” to “High.”
The Quassam Cyber Fighters claim that all three attacks are part of what they call “Operation Ababil,” which aims to harm the US financial structures in response to the same YouTube video mocking the Prophet Mohammed that has sparked riots around the world. The group also threatened more attacks if the video is not removed from Youtube, claiming they would target U.S. Bank’s site on Wednesday and PNC Financial Services on Thursday and that each attack would last for eight hours.
Earlier in the week, Senator Joseph Lieberman tied the cyber attacks to Iran, but both the Iranian government and Quassam Cyber Fighers have refuted such claims.
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Click here to read more about the Wells Fargo attack.
