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Islamic Hacker Group Resumes Attacks On Banks

Posted by timothy on from the washing-your-mouth-out-with-soap dept.

tsamsoniw writes "PNC, Bank of America, SunTrust, and other major financial institutions have experienced a wave of DDoS attacks and site outages over the past couple of days, and Islamic extremist hacker group Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters is claiming responsibility. The group, which launched similar attacks earlier this year, reiterated its demands: that a controversial YouTube video mocking the prophet Mohammed "be eliminated from the Internet.""

4 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Someone tell me by kc67 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why can't these financial institutions stop a DDOS? I am being serious. Why can't these be mitigated at a data center?

    1. Re:Someone tell me by SecurityTheatre · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I worked to help a company under DDOS attack mitigate the threat.

      Their normal bandwidth usage was on the order of 400Mbps, they has about 1Gbps of capacity. They were peered to several regional NOCs that maintained about 50Gbps of connectivity, I believe. Keep in mind that 50Gbps with multiple peers costs on the order of $400,000 per year, if my math is correct.

      Well, regardless, the DDoS attacks from a single individual (who was later identified) were pushing about 60Gbps (!?!) of attack bandwidth. They not only overwhelmed the provider and their small datacenter, but the upstream NOC as well. The other issue is that the DDoS attacks were coming from a huge number of endpoints, sometimes 100,000 or more, so it was not practical to simply blacklist all of their networks, especially since many were on cable modems, or other servers in major companies that had been infected with some botnet, or otherwise.

      On the whole, a major financial institution CAN mitigate these attacks. You should note that the Bank of America website is still up.

      However, I estimate it costs them in excess of $100,000 per month to do so.

  2. Re:Fuck them by ultranova · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The muslims or the banks?

    Snark aside, I think we should encourage the transition from real to this kind of financial cyber-terrorism - not only does it not get anyone killed, but the targets have almost certainly deserved it many times over. Heck, harassing the banks could well end up helping the economy by hindering their ability to parasite off it.

    Two evils duking it out is great for the rest of us, who get a break from both, and some free entertainment on top of it. Make some popcorn, pop a few beers, and watch the fireworks.

    --

    Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  3. Re:Islamism is the Problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When the Christians come up with government support to kill you for being an atheist I'll start to consider them a bigger threat. Until then you're neglecting the bigger picture. Most likely because you have a chip on your shoulder and haven't seriously considered how much your life would be totally fucked in a Muslim nation. And so it goes.
     
    Why is it that every article about Islam brings out the Christian bashers in droves? I guess these kinds of people have no perspective. In some countries your post would get you jailed (and worse) for admitting to be an atheist. Tell me how the Christians are doing this to you again? Show me the great Christian theocracy is that you guys claim is just as bad as nations that openly support Sharia law.