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...

Re:Divulging

[roblarky]

That's irregardless.

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

[Cryacin]

Sack a signficant portion of your workforce because you have to cut costs because your institution bought snake oil, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of what you get. I work for a bank (not BofA), and we're already seeing massive brain drain, and the bank I work for was just caught in the maelstrom. Definitely not saying to feel sorry for anyone, just don't be surprised, and start planning to deal with crap like this as the banks begin to become head cases.

Re:Like the alternative is so much better

[Thelasko]

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

It's not a normal conditions, they can't keep up with the throngs of angry customers closing their bank accounts.

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: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.

Re:Their lack of disclosure is very worrysome

[Dahan]

(which of course is on top of the 3% fee they charge to the merchant)

No, it's instead of the 3% fee they charge the merchant. The whole reason they're going to make the debit card user pay the fee instead of having the merchant pass the fee along to the user through the product price is because as of a few days ago, it's illegal for them to charge the merchant more than $0.21 + 0.05%. Now I'm all for turning hidden fees into non-hidden ones, but we all know that merchants aren't going to reduce their prices now that they no longer have to pay large debit card fees.

It's not like there's a shortage of banks in this country to do your banking with.

What about banks that don't charge a debit card fee? The number of those is definitely on the decline. Wells Fargo, Chase, and SunTrust are also planning on charging accountholders a fee to use their debit cards.

Financial pros speculate a different reason

[DCFusor]

Over at ZeroHedge (no they can't take a slashdotting so I'm not making it too easy) they point out that people are leaving BOA in droves, and pulling out all their money post-haste to make it moot whether they put up roadblocks to actually closing accounts.
.

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.
.

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....

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

[Rockoon]

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.