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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."
a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening
I don't think that word means what you think it means...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I think we should all have an accoutn wioth a 2nd back - becuase what if your primary bank is taken down technologically and you need to pay bills... all my bills are electronic I get NO paperbills at this point....
"We're not being attacked, we just are totally incompetent and can't keep our site up under normal conditions"
Bastard operator from America?
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
Too incompetent to even know they are under attack.
It's amazing what can be done with a tape vault, bulk eraser, and access to certain PIN numbers.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Every time I have a complaint against a company, I know my best recourse is to go elsewhere. Many people think/say this, but reality is that the convenience (or in most cases the lack of inconvenience) of staying with some company goes a looong way to keep us from putting our money where our mouth is. My BofA accounts are my oldest because I was a naive 16 year old boy who didn't know anything about banking, so I went with the most convenient. Many years have passed and I have multiple credit union accounts with most of my money. The problem is, these credit unions don't have very good ATM/physical locations, especially outside of where I live. For this reason I have kept my BofA account, because there is one everywhere. FYI: Nobody, NOBODY should be using BofA savings/cd etc and thinking you're doing good with your money. They have the most abysmal APY of any bank I have ever seen. Get a credit union account, please. Their customer service is horrible, I have spent almost an hour on hold before. I have had problems with my debit card randomly being declined places, and magically working again (not a strip error or anything). I have had problems with their automatic shutoff protection flagging my accounts when I'm spending the exact same amounts of money at the exact same places I do every week, forcing me to call them and turn my accounts back on. They even bait-and-switched me on a credit card. They advertised some no maintenance fee card, I wanted a low limit card 'just in case', so I signed up for it. At the end of the year, I get charged a service fee on it. I called them up, asking why my no-fee card was charged one, and they said "details of the card can differ between the advertisement and the agreement you actually signed." So i check my the papers I signed, and sure enough, in the details there is a fee (which I skipped over because the advertisement for this exact card said otherwise, no stipulation) Shame on me for not being more careful, but a dirty trick regardless. Even through all that I have kept my old accounts for the 'convenience'. Now with the debit card fees and this recent outage, I am done. It has taken a long time, but they have tried their best to completely drive me off. So I ask all of you, stop and REALLY think if shitty service (from any company!) is worth their 'convenience'. I think if more people realy started voting with their wallets, we would stop getting abused so much by large corporations. Just take your business elsewhere.
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.
Credit cards. Home mortgages, car loans,
None of these involve checking accounts with debit cards. And with home mortgages, you have zero control over who your lender is, but again, you won't be charged a $5/month fee for using a debit card if all you have with BofA is a home loan. You have to willingly go there and set up a checking account to get that kind of "service".
No one's forcing you to get a credit card or car loan with BofA.
payments to relatives who only have accounts on it etc
Huh? Please explain. If you need to send money to people, there's this thing called a "check" (or "cheque" for our non-American readers). You put it in an envelope and send it to the recipient. There's also money orders, cashier's checks, wire transfers, and of course Paypal. And don't forget good ol' cash. All with different fees and levels of security and convenience.
BOA are assholes to small businesses that need to process checks from them.
So why do any small businesses bother doing business with them, instead of simply going to one of the dozens or hundreds of other banks or credit unions in their locality?
They will only process like $50 and will charge you to cash out a customers check, unless of course you have an account with BOA too ... wink wink.
Huh? If your customer has a BofA account (which immediately makes their intelligence rather suspect; maybe you should look for another customer), and gives you a check from that account, it's simple: you take it to your own bank, and deposit it. Your bank will get the money transferred from BofA for no fee. Of course, this won't let you avoid alerting the IRS to any large transactions, but that's the price you pay for evading taxes.
Citigroup I heard is doing the same thing forcing businesses to have accounts with these aweful people agaisnt their will so the banks can invest and and collect interest off of their money. Crooks
Again, you're not making much sense. No bank can "force" you to have an account with them, and checks have been a no-fee way of transferring money for at least 100 years now (unless you're one of these morons that goes to a check-cashing store).
When I lived in Alaska, most of the banking there were credit unions. They were awesome! AlaskaUSA credit union was the best union out there and I plan to move my money in one. Not all credit unions are great though so you have to shop around. Here in Florida I do not like them but any of them are better in bank of America.
I live in Arizona, formerly on the east coast, and I've been using credit unions in both places since 1994. They're located pretty much everywhere to my knowledge, people just ignore them because they're smaller and a lot of people for some dumb reason think they need to always patronize the biggest corporation they can find. I did have to change accounts from one here in AZ recently, however, called AZFCU. They got too involved in the mortgage mess I suppose, and as a result of their bad decisions they had to close a lot of branches, including the ones that were convenient to me. So I moved to another CU that had better branch locations and didn't seem to be having hard times, and everything's been good with them so far.
If corruption were not so rampant there would be laws agaisnt the rules of cashing others checks and BOA will die.
What rules are you talking about? Maybe I'm really missing something here (quite possible), but I thought cashing checks was a pretty simple affair. I've cashed/deposited business checks with my personal account and never had any problems (or fees) (different banks of course).
This time hopefully a tea party president will let them die a horrible death.
A TP President would give them a giant bail-out, just like Obama. If you think the TP politicians are any different from any other politicians, you're sadly mistaken. The only difference is the rhetoric they spew; their actions are all the same.
Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware
So, instead of a victim they're announcing to the world they're incompetent. I'm not at all certain that's an improvement. It was a choice between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea anyway. One way announces their security is sub-standard, the other that they just don't give a crap, which most of their customers already suspected anyway.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
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Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
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Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Maybe. That is still awful high for checking. Money is just dirt cheap right now, like I said hard to get more than a percent even from traditional high yield places. ING only offers 0.25% for normal checking accounts (as in ones that don't have tons of money in them). The CUs here are offering 0.05-0.25% depending on the CU and the kind of checking account.
I have trouble believing one would do 0.7%.
I think he may have just been making shit up. Unfortunately, something I've noticed with haters is they often feel the need to exaggerate their case for whatever reason. They start with a legitimate reason for disliking something, but then overstate it badly.
Part of that in this case could be trying to make the alternative look better than it is.
OK, unless you're an illegal alien or a homeless person, why wouldn't you have a bank account?
Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
Yes, these are probably mostly illegals; they can't get bank accounts because they don't have valid SS numbers.
There is a reason that the check cashing business is so huge in inner cities, and its not because of all the Mexicans and Cubans in places like Boston, New Haven, and New York.
You are ignorant and lacking of even a small amount of common sense.
"His name was James Damore."
Some place that provides, well, data, like say Bankrate:
http://www.bankrate.com/rates/safe-sound/memorandums-memos.aspx?fedid=480228
They seem to feel B of A is sound these days. So you'll have to forgive me if I'm not panicking because someone else is saying "The world is ending!"
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).
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Many people are poor and cannot maintain a balance, and as such must pay a monthly fee to have a bank account.. which they cannot afford to do, so they don't have bank accounts.
You don't need to maintain a balance to have a bank account. Maybe at shitty banks like BofA you do, but any credit union will happily give you a savings account (they call it a "share account") for free, and all you have to do is keep $5 in it (which is easy, they simply don't let you withdraw it below that level). Of course, this isn't quite as useful as a checking account, but you don't have to worry about overdrafts, and there's no problem depositing checks into your share account for free.
There is a reason that the check cashing business is so huge in inner cities, and its not because of all the Mexicans and Cubans in places like Boston, New Haven, and New York.
You are ignorant and lacking of even a small amount of common sense.
So then why don't you educate me about why check-cashing is so huge in those places, smartass? Is it because all those people are too stupid to get a free account at the local credit union?
And sorry, I don't see how it's "common sense" to not understand why anyone wouldn't have a bank account in this day and age. It's not like I hang around dirt-poor people all the time. Heck, I grew up in a rather poor family, and even so, we always had a bank account; my mom took me to the bank when I was 9 or 10 years old and got me my own savings account, even though we didn't exactly have much money to put in it.
It depends on how you do it. If you pwn 10,000 PCs with code you wrote and DDoS someone with your home made botnet, it is indeed a hack.
However, I doubt this is a hack. Their servers are probably overloaded from all the people logging on to cancel their accounts. Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge? Durbin was right; this isn't a DDoS, it's a Netflixing. Their CEO is incredibly out of touch (like most bankers). I hope they go out of business.
They should listen to the antitea protesters who are now protesting wall street in 50 cities. People are really pissed off; wall street ignores us at their peril.
Free Martian Whores!
Oh, they still exist. You just have to look around. I've been using Lee County Bank & Trust's reward checking account for 2 or 3 years now. They started out paying 4.5% or so on balances up to $25K. Now they "only" pay 2.5%. (I do expect this deal, and others like it, to evaporate once the new restrictions on debit card fees go into effect, since the "catch" with these deals is you have to use your debit card at least 10 or so times per month, so that the banks can earn their $0.40 per transaction or whatever it is they earn).
Link: Lee County Bank (warning , terrible flash site). There are more such banks cataloged at sites like bankrate.com, I think.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge?
Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
Well, you have to figure what they could say...
"We've been down for a week, because ...."
1) "... because hackers took control of most of the network."
2) "... because a paramilitary group seized control of our datacenters."
3) "... because we don't want our customers retrieving the records before they leave over the $5/transaction fee"
4) "... because the IT people have been real busy fixing it. So busy in fact, that we couldn't ask one of them for clarification on if it was a hack, DoS, or gross negligence."
5) "... because ... FUCK YOU , that's why. It's our bank, you're just the customer. That'll be another $5 fee for asking. Get back in line before we charge you more."
Oddly enough, the reason I have absolutely refused to deal with BoA for several years, is because they seem to prefer the 5th option. I see they haven't changed their bad habits.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Because you can't log in to the webserver to cancel? Perhaps the denial of service was internal and intentional.
So get out of your "Command Centre" and up the stairs / Stenna lift, pop yourself in your obesity scooter, and trundle on over to the nearest branch with your personal details in hand, and pull all of your cash out of the bank there and then, in form of a Banker's Draft if you live in a less-than-safe neighbourhood. Instruct them to provide you with the details of your direct debits, then cancel all of them. Scoot on over to your local credit union or other financial institution and set up an account with your big wad of cash / Banker's Draft, and have them contact the companies to set up new DD's. If they can't, spend half an hour calling the companies yourself.
There is always a way.
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