Washington: Iranian hackers have repeatedly attacked Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Citigroup over the past year as part of a broad cyber campaign targeting the United States, according to people familiar with the situation.
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 the sources.
They said there was evidence suggesting the hackers targeted the three banks in retaliation for their enforcement of Western economic sanctions against Iran. Whether the hackers have been able to inflict more serious damage on computer networks or steal critical data is not yet known.
Iran has beefed up its cyber capabilities after its nuclear program was damaged in 2010 by the Stuxnet virus, widely believed to have been developed by the United States. Tehran has publicly advertised its intentions to build a cyber army and encouraged private citizens to hack against Western countries....
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12:03 PM, Sep 22, 2012
New Delhi: Anonymous India hackers targeted the official website Samajwadi Party in response to the party's Member of Parliament Ram Gopal Yadav demanding a ban on social networking websites. Yadav was participating in a debate in the Rajya Sabha on rumours triggering panic over ethnic violence in Assam that is leading to a mass exodus of people from the North East from Bangalore. "TANGO DOWN: http://www.samajwadiparty.in ..." @opindia_revenge tweeted. Access...
05:33 PM, Aug 17, 2012
San Francisco: Two service outages within the course of several hours rocked microblogging platform Twitter on Thursday, as users worldwide reported significant down-time and slow service across both Twitter's website and mobile applications. Amid speculation that Twitter had been crippled by a hacker attack, the San Francisco-based company blamed the outage - one of its most severe episodes in recent months - on a "cascading bug" in one of its...
11:24 AM, Jun 22, 2012
London: Russia's embassy in London said on Sunday its website crashed in a suspected hacking attack just before Prime Minister David Cameron begins the first visit by a British leader to Moscow since the 2006 killing in London of a Kremlin critic. The embassy said it had set up a "mirror" website (www.rusemborguk.ru) to meet the increased interest of the public and media for information before Cameron flies to Russia...
06:55 AM, Sep 12, 2011
Brasilia: Hackers briefly disabled three websites belonging to the Brazilian government early on Wednesday in the latest of an international wave of cyber attacks on companies and organizations. The sites for Brazil's federal government, presidency, and tax collection agency were inaccessible to the public for about two and a half hours overnight but their operation has since been restored, Gilberto Paganotto, the head of Brazil's computer data agency, told Reuters....
01:13 PM, Jun 23, 2011
Bangkok: A Thailand-based news website critical of Myanmar's military government says it has been hacked by unknown attackers who posted fake articles on it. The Irrawaddy website is run by exiled Myanmar journalists. It said on its home page Sunday that it was trying to fix the problem and prevent further attacks. The Irrawaddy's coverage of Myanmar has included exclusive photos of secret military missions to North Korea. It has...
10:42 AM, Mar 14, 2011
Johannesburg/London: If anyone needed proof that cyber activists can create havoc in the real world, the last few weeks have provided evidence in megabytes. Rallying behind WikiLeaks, the thousands of internet activists who made headlines in December by bringing down the websites of MasterCard and Visa have been branching out. Operating under the banner "Anonymous", their other forms of action have included hacker defacements of websites, real-life protests such as...
10:52 AM, Jan 20, 2011
London: Cyber activists say they have brought down Zimbabwean government websites after the president's wife sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks cable linking her with illicit diamond trading. President Robert Mugabe's wife Grace is suing a private newspaper for $15 million for publishing details from US cables on WikiLeaks saying she gained "tremendous profits" from illicit diamonds. The activists, acting under the name Anonymous, said in a statement on...
12:38 PM, Dec 31, 2010
New Delhi: Future Group's plans to boost on-line sales has come across a cyber hurdle with its flagship e-commerce portal FutureBazaar being attacked and rendered dysfunctional for the last two days. Terming the hacking of www.futurebazaar.com as 'denial of service attack', FutureBazaar Chief Executive Officer Rajiv Prakash told PTI, "The website has been down for the last couple of days and has been blocked to consumers." He said the company...
07:30 PM, Dec 22, 2010
London: Amazon.com Inc's websites in Europe suffered an outage for more than half an hour on Sunday night, in what the company said was a hardware failure in its European data centre network. "The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European datacenter network and not the result of a DDoS attempt," a spokeswoman for Amazon told Reuters. Amazon was among...
12:24 PM, Dec 13, 2010
London: Amazon.com Inc's websites in Britain, France, Germany and Spain suffered an outage for more than half an hour on Sunday night, but it was not immediately clear whether it was due to a cyber attack. Amazon was among the first US firms to pull the plug on WikiLeaks since it began publishing thousands of US diplomatic cables, withdrawing hosting services last week after being questioned by the US Senate...
10:39 AM, Dec 13, 2010
London: Cyber activists attacking organizations seen as foes of WikiLeaks briefly blocked a Dutch prosecution website on Friday after a 16-year-old suspected of involvement in the campaign was arrested in the Netherlands. The activists also tried to block the website of online payment firm Moneybookers, but denied their attacks were intended to create business turmoil or badly disrupt online Christmas shopping. Several companies have ended services to WikiLeaks after it...
01:26 PM, Dec 11, 2010
London: WikiLeaks supporters on Friday downloaded increasing amounts of the spam-shooting software used to attack companies seen as hostile - a development that could challenge even Internet giants such as PayPal and Amazon.com during the crucial Christmas shopping season. US data security company Imperva says downloads of the attack program used to bombard websites with bogus requests for data have jumped to over 40,000, with thousands of new downloads reported...
12:59 PM, Dec 11, 2010
London: Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of cyber activists who targeted Visa and other Internet payment sites that sought to block the WikiLeaks website after its release of US diplomatic cables. Facebook confirmed it had removed the activists' Operation Payback site on Thursday because it was promoting a distributed denial of service attack - an illegal form of freezing websites. Twitter declined to comment. The swoop against Operation Payback's...
12:33 PM, Dec 10, 2010
London: The website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted. While most countries have plowed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as al Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict. But attempts to silence WikiLeaks after the leaking...
04:29 PM, Dec 09, 2010
New York: The websites for Visa and MasterCard were inaccessible for parts of Wednesday, likely the result of attacks by WikiLeaks supporters who are angry that the credit card companies had stopped processing donations to the organization. Both MasterCard and Visa said that cardholders' accounts were not at risk and that people could continue using their credit cards throughout the day. Supporters of the WikiLeaks, which has released thousands of...
11:47 AM, Dec 09, 2010
Boston: Advocates of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange quickly built a cyber army that took down MasterCard Inc's website using simple tools posted on the Web. MasterCard's website was shut down for much of the day on Wednesday as a group calling itself AnonOps organized a "Denial of Service" attack on the credit card giant, which had stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks after the United States criticized its release of sensitive...
11:32 AM, Dec 09, 2010
