A group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Quassam Cyber Fighters is claiming responsibility for the series of DDoS attacks on major U.S. financial institutions over the past 2 weeks, according to Bloomberg, and were possibly inspired as revenge for the controversial YouTube video. The attacks, which escalated last week, are raising concerns across the industry in part because it was assumed that the major U.S. banks have sufficient cyber security to defend against distributed denial of service attacks.
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which gathers threat, vulnerability, and risk information about cyber and physical security risks faced by the financial services sector under a Presidential directive, is maintaining an orange “High” warning level on its 5-level warning scale of Cyber Threats. (the highest level is 5-point red for “Severe” risk of cyber attacks on financial institutions). FS-ISAC raised the warning level to Orange on September 19th.
