Hackers Cause Disruptions for Wells Fargo Site

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The ongoing cyberattacks against U.S. financial institutions appear to be picking up steam again. A DDoS attack against Wells Fargo has been preventing some customers from accessing the bank’s website.

According to Reuters, “Wells Fargo & Co on Tuesday said its online banking website was experiencing an unusually high volume of traffic that it believes stems from a denial-of-service cyber attack. ‘The vast majority of customers are not impacted and customer information remains safe,’ said Bridget Braxton, a spokeswoman for the fourth-largest U.S. bank by assets. Customers who have trouble should try logging in again because the disruption is usually intermittent, she said.”

InformationWeek’s Matthew J. Schwartz reported, “Wells Fargo’s website suffered disruptions Tuesday, after the al-Qassam Cyber Fighters hacktivist group vowed to continue its long-running campaign of U.S. banking website takedowns. According to website downtime and outage reporting service Sitedown.co, over the past 24 hours, banking customers posted higher than normal numbers of downtime reports for Wells Fargo (232 reports) and Bank of America (46 reports). Some customers also reported difficulties accessing the websites of Chase, Capital One, Citibank and PNC Bank, and in some cases also the banks’ mobile banking sites.”

CNET’s Lance Whitney noted, “The bank didn’t reveal the source of the attack. But a group called Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters posted a warning on Pastebin yesterday, saying that it was launching denial of service attacks against several major U.S. banks, including BB&T, PNC, Chase, Citibank, U.S. Bancorp, Suntrust, Fifth Third Bancor, and Wells Fargo. The group claims to be targeting banks in protest over the ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ a YouTube video that has aroused anger from those who consider it anti-Islam.”

Jennifer Booton with FOXBusiness observed, “The same group took the credit for a series of relentless DDoS attacks in the fall. The attacks tend to do little outside of temporarily impacting a site’s usability. Customer’s funds and personal information usually aren’t compromised in such attacks.”