Bank Attackers Restart Operation Ababil DDoS Disruptions

Some customers report difficulty accessing banking sites, but officials said DDoS defenses and service provider blocks may be partly to blame.

The hacktivist Muslim bank website takedown crew is back.
The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters Tuesday
announced via Pastebin
that they would resume their Operation Ababil distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks this week against U.S. financial institutions.
During ... Operation Ababil Phase 3, like previous phases, a number of american banks will be hit by denial of service attacks three days a week, on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday during working hours, read the groups latest statement.
The al-Qassam Cyber Fighters last week
issued an Al-Qassam ultimatum
, warning that unless all copies of the Innocence of Muslims movie that mocks the founder of Islam are removed from the Internet, it would
commence a third round
of bank DDoS attacks. To warn and to show our seriousness for this, an attack string was carried out against some U.S. banks on Monday February 25, 2013 such as Bank of America, PNC, CapitalOne, Zions bank, 5/3, Unionbank, Comerica, Citizenbank, Peoples, UFCU, Patelco, and others, it said.
[ Anonymous targets Wall Street. Read
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This week, the group appeared to carry through with those threats. According to the
Site Down website
, beginning Tuesday, customers of Bank of America, Capital One, Citibank, PNC Bank, Union Bank and Wells Fargo began reporting an increased number of website disruptions.
One commenter on Site Down posted Tuesday morning, Can not access bankofamerica.com. Web site will not load...however...I CAN connect and log in using my iPhone. Strange. Another post read: Site STILL down. Can we get a response??? am ready to take my banking elsewhere; this is getting ridiculous. Similar
bursts of customer frustration
were likewise directed at the other supposedly disrupted websites.
But have the banks sites really been disrupted? BoA spokesman Mark T. Pipitone suggested otherwise. At this point, weve had no issues on our end, he said via email.
Another bank official, speaking on background by phone, said that while many financial services websites are being targeted with DDoS attacks, peoples inability to reach the websites is likely a side effect of the DDoS attack-scrubbing services and technology that firms now have in place, as well as service providers own defenses. In other words, when a person cant access a banking site, it may be because their network, IP address or machine is being blocked by DDoS mitigation tools.
Furthermore, with a bank such as BoA alone counting 57 million customers, it can be difficult to tell whether the number of people who havent been able to access a particular website on a given day has altered in a statistically significant way. Looking at BoA, over the past month the Site Down website received about 13 reports per day that the site couldnt be accessed. That number increased to an average of 18 per day this week, and 52 in the past 24 hours.
Of course, the combination of DDoS attacks and DDoS defenses does seem to be keeping some customers from accessing banking websites, even though the actual sites may still be up. That speaks to the scale of the website attacks -- and thus defenses in place against them. The attacks
combine multiple attack techniques
with massive scale, which has included maintaining sustained packet floods peaking at 70 Gbps and 30 million packets per second.
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Bank Attackers Restart Operation Ababil DDoS Disruptions