Five Major Bank Servers Affected by Unexpected Flood of Traffic

Bank of America along with at least five other major US banks recently had their website operations disrupted by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks flooded the targets with traffic which was clocked exceeding 60GB per second by using hundreds of compromised Web servers. A relatively new attack tool known as “itsoknoproblembro” was used on some of the hijacked servers.

The attackers simultaneously saturated routers, bank servers, and any running applications quickly overwhelmed the targets, temporarily shutting the sites down. However crippling these attacks may be to websites, they are temporary. DDoS attacks are not breaches of internal security as no customer data is accessed, and funds remain unaffected.

This article goes into greater depth about the technicality of the attack, explaining how the attackers were able to so quickly adapt their attack and become much more effective than previous attacks.

Original article by Dan Goodin.
Read the full story here.