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Qassam Cyber Fighters DDoS Campaign Against U.S. Banks Slows

Posted: 19th June 2013
By: CHRIS
Qassam Cyber Fighters DDoS Campaign Against U.S. Banks Slows

The excellent Krebs on Security blog, by former Washington Post writer Brian Krebs, reported last week that the long running campaign of cyber attacks against U.S. banks went quiet ahead of Iran’s recent presidential election. We thought it would be useful to add a visual component to the reporting by Krebs and confirm a slowdown in reported cyber attacks against banks.

The timeline below was generated using Recorded Future to display reported cyber attacks against companies in banking or financial services between January and June. The dip in reported issues during late May and early June is clear.

The Iranian government, believed by many to be behind the DDoS attacks by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters that began in mid-September 2012, has denied responsibility. But in his blog post, Krebs furthers connects the dots by citing findings published at Google’s Online Security Blog of increased phishing activity leading up to the Iranian election that sought to compromise Google account users in Iran. The suggestion is that energy and resources used for the bank attacks were, at least temporarily, diverted to domestic political operations such as the phishing campaign.

If you’ve followed this issue, you’ll remember that the purported goal of the cyber campaign was to get the Innocence of Muslims removed from YouTube. Nothing has changed on that front, so we’ll now wait and see if the attacks against U.S. banks resume in their previous form or if a differently styled campaign begins.

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