Cyberterrorists Claim Credit for BoA Outage

by InvestorPlace Staff | September 19, 2012 12:00 pm

As customers took to Twitter to deride the prolonged outage of Bank of America‘s (NYSE:BAC[1]) online banking website yesterday, a group claiming to be the cyber division of Hamas took credit for the downed site on Pastebin.com.

The post, allegedly written by the “Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam,” cites “The Innocence of Muslims” as its motivation for the attack. The controversial low-budget film was implicated in protests against U.S. embassies earlier this month. The group also threatened to carry out an as-of-yet unexecuted cyberattack on the New York Stock Exchange, as part of its campaign against “America-Zionist capitalists.”

The Pastebin posting should not be taken at face value, however. Outages of GoDaddy.com and Twitter earlier this year, originally self-attributed to various hacker groups, later turned out to be technical issues.

WhiteHat Security chief strategy officer Bill Pennington told InformationWeek[2] in an interview that “it’s reasonable to believe [the outage] could be coincidence.” However, he noted that it would not be difficult to bring down the website with a denial-of-service attack.

– Ryan Hauck, InvestorPlace

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