Wells Fargo & Company’s (NYSE:WFC) websites have been the latest victim of disruption by cyber attackers who claimed to be outraged by the anti-Muslim film mocking the Prophet Muhammad. The group named Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters claimed responsibility for the string of attacks launched against the websites of banks in the United States.
According to the report of Wall Street Journal, 220 customers had problems accessing their online accounts at Wells Fargo websites.
A spokesperson from Wells Fargo confirmed that some customers experienced logging on their accounts on the bank’s websites, and the company is taking the necessary actions to resolve the problem. The spokesperson emphasized that no customer account information has been compromised, and the outage was caused by a systems failure.
The WSJ report cited a statement from Dmitri Alperovitch, chief executive officer of CrowdStrike, a private security firm investigating the cyber attacks regarding the scope of disruption on the Wells Fargo’s websites. According to him, “The amount of bandwidth that is flooding the websites is very large, much larger than in other attacks, and in a sense unprecedented.”
Alporovitch also stated that the attacks on Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) websites were linked to the same group that disrupted the websites of other banks. He believed the group is only using the anti-Muslim video as an excuse in launching the attacks. He said, “I don’t believe these attacks had anything to do with the anti-Muslim video. I think the video is an excuse.”
The cyber attackers posted their plans to attack the websites of Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), U.S. Bancorp (NYSE:USB) and PNC Financial Services (NYSE:PNC) this week on the website pastebin.com. The group said it would continue to disrupt the websites of different U.S. banks until the controversial video has been removed on YouTube.
Izz ad din Al qassam wrote, “In the previous announcements, we stated that we will not tolerate insulting exalted character of the prophet of mercy and kindness. Due to the insult, we planned and accomplished a series of cyber operations against the insulting country’s credit and financial centers.”
A spokesman for U.S. Bancorp confirmed to WSJ that they are aware of the threat and are working with law-enforcement authorities while the spokesperson from the PNC refused to comment regarding the issue.
Last week, the group launched a denial-of-service attackon the websites of Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC). A similar attack was also experienced by JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM)’s Chase.com.
