Online cyber attacks against US banks linked to Iran

Late last year, multiple US banks were targeted online supposedly by a hacker group. Now government officials say it was the handiwork of Iran, possibly in response to cyber attacks launched from the US. This is believed to be so due to the sophistication of the attack, which ruled out its launch by a fringe group.

Recently, several banks across the nation had been hit with DDoS attacks that caused harm for ten or so minutes before they recovered. The affected banks were the likes of Wells Fargo, HSBC, Bank of America and Citigroup, among others.
 
According to a former state official, the US government was 100 per cent certain that Iran was the cause of the attacks. Also, security firm Radware's vice president Carl Herberger is quoted to have said the scale, the scope and the effectiveness of the attacks had been unprecedented. There had never been that many financial institutions under that much duress, he added.

Fortunately, none of the bank accounts had been violated, and no money has been taken in the attacks directed from data centres that are said to have taken control of some small-time cloud services and used them as the powerhouse behind initiating the attacks.

Two issues though were making it difficult to resolve the problem - the DDoS attacks were encrypted, and it was not known how the data centres were being hijacked.
According to James A Lewis, a former official in the state and commerce departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, there was no doubt within the US government that Iran was behind the attacks.

The amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was ''multiple times'' that was directed at Estonia by Russia, in a month long online assault in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation, it added.
 
Another reason that experts cite to believe that Iran was behind the attacks was that the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: hallmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said.

By using data centres, the attackers were simply keeping up with the times, according to analysts. Companies and consumers were increasingly conducting their business over large-scale ''clouds'' of hundreds, even thousands, of networked computer servers run by Amazon and Google and many smaller players who commonly rented them to other companies.

The hackers probably remotely hijacked some of these clouds and used the computing power to take down American banking sites.