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Home Front: WoT
U.S. warns of possible Qaeda financial cyber attack
2006-12-01
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government warned American private financial services on Thursday of an al Qaeda call for a cyber attack against online stock trading and banking Web sites beginning on Friday, a source said. The source, a person familiar with the warning, said the Islamic militant group aimed to penetrate and destroy the databases of the U.S. financial sites.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed an alert had been distributed but said there was no reason to believe the threat was credible.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a "situational awareness report to industry stakeholders," said Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke. The warning said the threat called for attacks to begin Friday and run through the month of December in retaliation for the United States keeping terrorism suspects fat and happy at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

"Denial of service is what it called for," said a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
We've already seen a bunch of these, some here at the Burg, some at other popular conservative web sites. They've come from all sorts of 'interesting' places. I'd be real surprised if financial institutions haven't already been targeted in some way. This just ups the ante.
A person familiar with the warning said the threat came from a group calling itself "ANHIAR al-Dollar." The effort was related to al Qaeda and intended to avenge "Muslim brothers in the crusaders' Guantanamo prison camp," the source said.

Reaction in the financial community was muted, with markets showing little or no reaction.
In other words, people who really understand this understand that counter-measures are in place and will work.
New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, said the report was "nothing to panic over, but it will be looked at very carefully."

Robert Albertson, chief investment strategist at Sandler O'Neill & Partners in New York, said it was unlikely al Qaeda members could do serious harm to financial Web sites. "I'm not saying there aren't precautions to be taken, but I just can't fathom how there would be serious havoc," he added.

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the RAND Corp., said that such threats were not unusual. "There is a regular stream of Jihadist exhortations to attack various targets," he said. "Financial organizations stay at a fairly high level of readiness anyway because of regular assaults."

A government source said regulators were being briefed on the warning.
Posted by:Steve White

#6  A denial of service attack isn't that hard to stop, especially for a large commercial site. Hacking (actually breaking into a site) should be protected against by the five levels of security that any site should maintain. Of course, there's always the jerk that tries to use "password" for a password, or their last name, or some other silly nonsense. That's why most modern systems use internally-generated random passwords. What's really needed is a clandestine group that can be notified when an attack is attempted, can follow the attack back to its host computer, and do some serious data-collecting before screwing the system over completely. There are quite a number of hackers in the US that would consider such an opportunity richly rewarding.
Posted by: Old Patriot   2006-12-01 14:29  

#5  If we got an agriculture report in this style, it would contain words like "moo-cow" and "quack-quack".

Hahahaha!
Posted by: Shipman   2006-12-01 08:26  

#4  Waay back when I was trying to help out Internet Haganah, I saw what some of the Islamic crazies were considering doing. They did manage to knock his site off the internet for a tiny bit, but when he mirrored his site ( about 17 mirrors ) they gave up.

Anyways, reading about some of the tools they were considering using, like oversized pings and such, all measures considered to be dated and ineffectual against modern Unix-like kernels

Not saying its the same folks, but I haven't heard of any instance in which Ayrabs have tried against industrial strength sites nowadays.

It will be interesting to see how they do it, but I get the feeling these guys are a coupla generations behind where they need to be to really wreck havoc on financial sites.

Just my humble opinion.
Posted by: badanov   2006-12-01 08:07  

#3  So, which is it, "penetrate and destroy the databases", or "denial of service"? They are two completely different objectives.

Ah, right...Reuters. It's about the level of reporting I expect from them. If we got an agriculture report in this style, it would contain words like "moo-cow" and "quack-quack".
Posted by: gromky   2006-12-01 05:54  

#2  The Department of Homeland Security confirmed an alert had been distributed but said there was no reason to believe the threat was credible.

Thereby cutting into their own credibility among those who know.
Posted by: gorb   2006-12-01 03:22  

#1  Stop playing defense - go on the offense. Turn the Tiger Teams loose for some serious ratfucking.
Posted by: .com   2006-12-01 01:52  

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