In response to several days of DDoS attacks, Wells Fargo has advised some customers to visit bank branches or use telephone banking instead of connecting online.
“In a statement, a bank spokeswoman described the issue as ‘an unusually high volume of traffic’ that is causing slow or intermittent access to its website,” writes Computerworld’s Jeremy Kirk. “‘The vast majority of customers are not impacted, but for those who are, we encourage them to access their accounts through our stores, ATMs or by phone as we work to resolve the issue,’ she wrote. “Wells Fargo is one of several banks that have been targeted with distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks over the last several months, which seek to jam websites with traffic to make them unavailable.”
“The Wells Fargo bank website outage was one of several that SiteDown.com was tracking Friday, recording nearly 1,500 downtime complaints in the last week,” writes The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Jim Hammerand. “Others included problems with the websites of Bank of America, Chase and PNC Bank.”
“The hacktivist group Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters Group on Dec. 18 posted an update on Pastebin, saying targeted banks could expect more distributed-denial-of-service attacks this week, resembling the magnitude of attacks waged against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Financial Services, U.S. Bancorp and SunTrust Bank a week earlier,” writes BankInfoSecurity’s Tracy Kitten.
“The actual impact on banks by the continued denial of service (four days of outages for Wells Fargo this week) is still unclear,” notes Betabeat’s Steve Huff. “A report by Bank Info Security about the first wave of attacks from the al-Qassam Cyber Fighters in October indicated that in addition to inconvenience and customer loss, there is a danger that DDoS outages could be distractions for real hack attacks, in which customer funds are covertly transferred away, possibly to support future cyber espionage.”
