Cyber-Terrorism: Is our money safe?

Earlier this week several major banks in the United States were attacked by a cyber-terrorist group known as Al-Din-Al-Qassam, believed to be located somewhere in Iran. This group is suspected to be the same group that was responsible for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the Bank of America. The companies affected by this attack were: Well's Fargo, PNC, U.S. Bank, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup.

The terrorists overloaded the bank's websites by creating excess traffic which prevented the customers from accessing their accounts and completing transactions. The excess traffic was created by large networks of computers that were previously hacked. These hacked computers simultaneously began sending requests to the banks websites, which, in such high volumes, ended up crashing their site. There are very few companies today that can stay fully operational during a DDoS cyber attack. A company's ability to withstand a cyber attack is based on the available bandwidth of their network. Their bandwidth must be able to handle the normal flow of customer traffic, as well as the cyber attack or the site will crash from an overload of hits.

A security firm was hired to look into the nature of the attack so that precautions could be taken for the likely future attacks. The security firm stated that "the amount of bandwidth that is flooding the websites is very large, much larger than in other attacks...". There are several precautions that a bank can take to prevent this from happening again:

• Increase their bandwidth
• Redirect traffic to a cloud based site
• Use routing tools that will redirect traffic to other locations in order to create a balance
• Purchase software that will filter out the incoming bad traffic

With the new innovations popping up in cyber-terrorism, it is expected that this type of attack will happen again. The most important thing that companies can do to protect themselves is to ensure that they have the proper security measures in place so that they are able to stay one step ahead of the hackers and protect valuable customer and company information. These precautions should not just be limited to banking companies, as all companies are vulnerable to this type of attack, especially now that we know that this type of technology is out there.


Cited:

"US Banks Being Hacked." 3sintel. Daily Mail Reporter, Sept.-Oct. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://3sintel.info/index.php?/topic/5621-us-banks-being-hacked/>.

Fernandez, Juan. "Wells Fargo Hacked, Iran Suspected of Cyber Attack Against Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase." Food World News. Food World News, 26 Sept. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://www.foodworldnews.com/articles/2346/20120926/wells-fargo-hacked-iran-suspected-of-cyber-attack-against-bank-of-america-and-jp-morgan-chase.htm>.

"Wells Fargo Becomes Latest Bank to Be Hacked by Cyber Gang Seeking Revenge for Anti-Islam Film." Mail Online. Daily Mail Reporter, 27 Sept. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2209403/Wells-Fargo-reveal-website-hacked-cyber-gang-seeking-revenge-anti-Islam-film.html>.

Gonsalves, Antone. "Banks Can Only Hope for Best with DDoS Attacks." CSO. N.p., 26 Sept. 2012. Web. 28 Sept. 2012. <http://www.csoonline.com/article/717350/banks-can-only-hope-for-best-with-ddos-attacks>.