From: Business Day Live (South Africa)

GLOBAL banks, brokerages and insurers have been warned to be on heightened alert for cyber attacks after Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase this week experienced unexplained outages on their public websites.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centre raised the cyber threat level to “high” from “elevated” in an advisory to members, citing “recent credible intelligence regarding the potential” for cyber attacks as its reason for the move.

The problems with the websites at the two banks came after an unidentified person posted a statement on the internet threatening to attack Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange as a “first step” in a campaign against US companies.

Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor Networks, said several US banks were under assault by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaign. He declined to identify them by name.

An outside security contractor who was familiar with the attacks said they were “massive” in scope. Denial-of-service attacks seek to disrupt websites and other computer systems at the targeted organisation by overwhelming their networks with computer traffic.

This week the FBI published a “fraud alert” advising financial services firms that cyber criminals may be disrupting service to their websites in a bid to keep banks from noticing a recent surge in fraudulent large-sized wire transfers.

“Often these DDoS attacks are part of a more sophisticated blended threat – one that utilises DDoS as a diversion for more complex, difficult-to-detect techniques with the intention to extract customer data or financial information,” said Holden.

On Wednesday the consumer banking website of JPMorgan Chase was intermittently unavailable to some customers. The problems followed issues with the website of Bank of America amid threats on the internet that a group was planning to launch cyber attacks on a US bank.

The advisory also cited a warning from Microsoft that hackers have attacked some of its customers by means of a security bug in its widely used Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft has yet to release software to fix that security flaw. The German government advised the public to stop using Internet Explorer until an update is released.