* Wells Fargo website facing lingering problems
* US Bancorp says working with federal officials
* PNC, also threatened, says taking precautions
By Rick Rothacker
Sept 26 (Reuters) – Some U.S. Bancorp and PNC
Financial Services customers were having trouble
accessing the banks’ websites on Wednesday, as U.S. financial
institutions appear to be threatened by another round of cyber
attacks.
Wells Fargo & Co also faced lingering problems with
its website after customers had intermittent access issues on
Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the bank said.
U.S. Bancorp is experiencing “unusual and high-traffic
volume” on its site that is designed to slow down the system,
bank spokesman Tom Joyce said. The problem is similar to what
other banks have faced in the past week, he said.
“We are working closely with federal law enforcement
officials to address this issue,” he said. Customers data and
funds are not at risk, he added.
A PNC spokesman said some if its customers may be
experiencing difficulty logging into the bank’s website on the
first attempt. “We are aware of the situation and are working to
restore full access,” spokesman Fred Solomon said.
The attacks came after a posting on the Internet on Tuesday
by an unknown person, calling for cyber attacks this week
against Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp and PNC. A similar posting
last week warned of attacks against Bank of America Corp
and the New York Stock Exchange.
The person who posted the message on a site called
pastebin.com said the attacks will continue until the film that
had stirred anti-U.S. protests across the Middle East was
removed from the Internet.
“Obviously, it looks coordinated,” said Jeff Herdell,
founder of a website called Sitedown.co, which has been tracking
customer complaints about the banks’ websites.
So-called denial-of-service campaigns are among the oldest
types of cyber attacks and do not require highly skilled
computer programmers or advanced expertise, compared with
sophisticated and destructive weapons like Stuxnet, a virus
widely believed to have been developed by the United States to
damage Iran’s nuclear program.
But the attacks can still be disruptive: If a bank’s website
is repeatedly shut down, the attacks can hurt its reputation,
affect customer retention and cause revenue losses as customers
cannot open accounts or conduct other business.
The attacks also cost banks because they have to add staff
to handle phone calls and pay for additional network bandwidth.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate’s Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said on Friday that
he believes Iran was behind the attacks.
“I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has
its own developing cyber attack capability,” Lieberman said
during a taping of C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers” program. The Quds Force
is a covert arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Reuters reported on Friday that Iranian hackers have
repeatedly attacked Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co
and Citigroup Inc over the past year as part of a broad
cyber campaign targeting the United States.
The attacks, which began in late 2011 and escalated this
year, have primarily been “denial of service” campaigns that
disrupted the banks’ websites and corporate networks by
overwhelming them with incoming web traffic, said sources.
