The principle fear when discussing hackers and bank accounts involves unauthorized transfers and electronic “robbery”. Recently, there have been a large number of cyber-attacks on U.S. banks. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC Financial Services and more have indicated that there have been concerted attacks against their websites that either crash or slow the system down to a crawl, making bank customer access to their accounts difficult, if not impossible. So far, there have been no thefts of funds as a result of these attacks detected. The main result so far of these attacks center around customers who were not able to pay bills or access their accounts during the attack.

These hackers are believed to have originated in the Middle East, orchestrated by Muslim activists opposed to a YouTube video that few people have actually seen that is purported to be anti-Islam. The Muslim group, dubbed the Cyber-Fighters of Izzad-din Al Qassam has announced that they were responsible for the attacks. They claim that the attacks will continue until the video is removed from YouTube. They use a sophisticated network of botnets, or a group of computers that have been infected with a malware virus allowing hackers to remotely control them. This botnet controlled by these protesters is tens of thousands of servers strong.

During these attacks, the botnet bombards the bank site with requests from tens of thousands of IP addresses at the same time. The limited servers cannot handle the traffic and slow down or shut down completely. Joe Lieberman, Senator and Chairman of the Homeland Security committee in the Senate blames the nation of Iran citing that country’s recent improved cyber forces. For the last year, there has been an effort of mainly Iranian hackers who were causing these attacks against many large United States financial institutions and corporate entities.

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