In the last week, starting Sept. 19, the websites of Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), U.S. Bank (USB, Fortune 500) and PNC Bank were the targets for cyber-attackers who had managed to take their revenge on the sites. You probably would have noticed that the sites were down if you were one of the customers. For many others the sites were completely unreachable. The attacks begun with the Bank of America and then spread to the rust. The latest victim yesterday was the PNC bank.
Security experts have noted that this attack was the largest ever cyberattack on banks recorded in the history. By the nature of attacks these are termed denial of service attacks. In simpler terms denial of service attacks means the cybercriminals redirect large traffic towards the sites of the banks leading to the high traffic at the websites and once the websites are over their capacity, they breakdown and become temporarily inaccessible to the people until maintenance comes to the rescue.
Usually banks which are generally targets of such attacks have measures to ward off such traffic but however, this time they could not succeed.
"The volume of traffic sent to these sites is frankly unprecedented," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks. "It's 10 to 20 times the volume that we normally see, and twice the previous record for a denial of service attack."
The attackers had somehow had several thousands of high-powered application servers and pointed them all at the targeted banks. That overwhelmed Bank of America and Chase's Web servers on Sept. 19, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank on Wednesday and PNC on Thursday. Fred Solomon, a spokesman for PNC, confirmed that a high volume of traffic on Thursday was affecting users' ability to access the website, but he declined to go into more detail.
Denial of service attacks are an effective but unsophisticated tool. They are not a security threat. No hacking is involved, no data is stolen from the bank, ATM or other transactional facilities. These denial of service attacks have no effect on the ATMs. The aim of the attacks was simply to temporarily knock down the banks' public-facing websites.
(AW- Anil)
