After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't Been Hacked

Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack."

Comments

Divulging

[ShaunC]

a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening

I don't think that word means what you think it means...

Like the alternative is so much better

[russotto]

"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"

Re:Like the alternative is so much better

[Grishnakh]

There should be a law that allows you to choose your lender, i.e., your mortgage can't be sold unless you approve the transfer. When you first buy a house, you have a choice in who you borrow money from: it's the institution that you go to to apply for your mortgage. But after that, if it gets sold, you have no control over who it gets sold to. That's not right. You signed on to be indebted to company X, not company Y or Z that wants to buy your debt.

Would you willingly borrow money from Vinnie the Loanshark? Probably not, unless you're really desperate. Why not? Because you don't like the way he treats his customers. So you borrow money from someplace that treats their customers/debtors better. But what if you got a loan from ABC Financial Services, and then they sold the loan to Vinnie, who then threatened to break your kneecaps? You never signed up for that kind of treatment. ABC should never have been allowed to sell that loan.

Same goes for mortgage loans. You should be able to pick your lender, and if they want to sell your loan to someone else, you should have the option to refuse. If they don't like this, they can just not loan money, or just hang onto the loans they have. They have no need to sell their loans.

Re:All Anonymous and Lulzsec have to do now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm glad that all the protesters on Wall Street are able to liveblog their protests of giant corporations using the latest iPhones, MacBooks, and iPads. And I think it's great that they can tweet all those photos of themselves wearing nice brand-name clothing and $400 eyewear.

It comforts me to know that hipsters haven't lost their delicious sense of irony over holding signs that claim they're part of the "99%" in between bong hits financed by mommy and daddy's trust funds.

Re:Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome

[Grishnakh]

Why not just bank with a better institution. I just read earlier today that BofA is going to institute a $5/month fee for the "privilege" of using your debit card (which of course is on top of the 3% fee they charge to the merchant). Why does anyone still have an account with this company? It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with. There's also thousands of credit unions.

At this point, it seems like anyone that still has an account with BofA must be a moron.

Re:All Anonymous and Lulzsec have to do now...

[Grishnakh]

Why does anyone still have an account with this company? It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with. There's also thousands of credit unions.

At this point, it seems like anyone that still has an account with BofA must be a moron.

Re:Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome

[sexconker]

If you have less than one months cash in savings, you're financially on your deathbed anyway.

Thank you, Suzie Orman. Now someone please call a medic!

I had gone about 2 years without hearing or seeing that woman.
I had completely forgot she existed.

And you reminded me.
Fuck you.

Traffic of people moving accounts out

[rednip]

The real issue is traffic, the article leads me to believe that the back end data is getting crushed by old records which don't usually get instantiated. They try to downplay it, but the real problem is the mass exodus. I bet the many old customers are going back though old statements and printing them in advance of a transfer. I've developed statements systems for another bank, they don't behave well when too many people rip through all of their old statements at once. There usually are even firewalls that might have capacity issues.

I can understand why they are trying to downplay this, as herd of customers preparing to leave is an embarrassment, but my 20/20 hindsight tells me that it should have been anticipated. Maybe it was a little, but I can't imagine that IT was brought in much before they announced what I see to be a bone-headed move to get out of retail banking.

Oh, yea, to stay on topic, sometimes people make mistakes. However, it's spelling issue, but a word choice, I don't think it's wrong. Odd maybe in it's use, but not wrong. Did you even look up Divulge before you before you commented, just to check the meaning. I did.

To disclose or reveal (something private, secret, or previously unknown).