Who Is Hacking U.S. Banks? 8 Facts
Hackers have labeled the bank website disruptions as grassroots-level reprisal for an anti-Islamic film. But is the Iranian government really backing the attacks?
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Who's behind the recent online attacks against U.S. banks? A Muslim hacktivist group calling itself the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam continues to take credit for the campaign of website disruptions. In recent weeks, its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, launched under the banner of "Operation Ababil," have disrupted the websites of some of Wall Street's biggest financial institutions, including Bank of America, BB&T, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, HSBC, New York Stock Exchange, Regions Financial, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo.
The hacktivist group's name refers to "Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s," according to The New York Times. In a similar vein, the website disruptions have been portrayed by some backers as a spontaneous, grassroots-driven online protest. But the actual identity of the attackers, as well as their motives or backing, remain the subject of much debate. Notably, U.S. officials--speaking anonymously in media interviews--have alleged that the group, despite what its own anonymous public pronouncements might claim, is nothing more than a front for an operation that's being run by the Iranian government.
In a series of Pastebin posts, the hacktivists have typically previewed which banks they'll be disrupting, as well as the dates and times of planned attacks. At the same time, they've broadly denied U.S. government officials' assertions, including allegations that the group has been involved in recent attacks that employed malware to obtain credentials for U.S. bank websites, allowing attackers to wire money from U.S. to overseas bank accounts, stealing up to $900,000 in one go.
So, what do the attackers want? According to their Pastebin pronouncements, their goal is relatively simple: they want to see the Innocence of Muslims film that mocks the founder of Islam removed from the Internet. A 14-minute clip of the film first surfaced on YouTube in July 2012, parts of which were broadcast on Egyptian television on Sept. 9, 2012.
The film has been attributed to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (a.k.a. Mark Basseley Youssef), 55, who was recently arrested in the United States on parole violations, which could see him returned to jail for two years. Nakoula, an Egyptian-born U.S. resident, was on parole after serving prison time for his 2010 conviction on bank fraud charges, and his alleged parole violations include using aliases, using a computer without supervision, and lying to his probation officer. Nakoula, however, has denied all charges against him. He's due back in court next month.
In the meantime, the attacks on banking websites show no signs of stopping.
Image credit: Photograph of Wall Street courtesy of Flickr user Michael Daddino.
The attackers have been targeting some of the country's largest financial institutions. On Oct. 16, in the fifth week of the banking attacks, CapitalOne even saw its online banking and corporate sites get disrupted by attackers for a second time, in what was the first repeat attack. Meanwhile, on Oct. 18, HSBC confirmed that not just its U.S. websites but also some global websites had been disrupted by attackers.
"HSBC servers came under a denial of service attack which affected a number of HSBC websites around the world," according to an Oct. 18 statement issued by the bank on the day it was attacked. "This denial of service attack did not affect any customer data, but did prevent customers using HSBC online services, including internet banking." By later that day, however, the bank said it had restored service.
While the outages are annoying for customers, they could also spell lost revenue for the businesses involved. Accordingly, might these bank website attacks portend a future in which hacktivists regularly seek to cause economic damage to U.S. businesses as a form of protest, or even low-grade cyber warfare? Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in a recent speech delivered to the Business Executives for National Security, suggested that possibility, as he warned how "a destructive cyber terrorist attack could paralyze the nation." Speaking of the attacks on bank websites, he said: "While this kind of tactic isn't new, the scale and speed was unprecedented."
Many cybersecurity watchers saw Panetta's speech as a thinly veiled threat to Iran. In recent weeks, U.S. government officials--again, speaking anonymously in media interviews, and referencing what they said were classified intelligence reports--have said that the signature of the banking attacks has been traced to a group of fewer than 100 information security specialists, all based at Iranian universities and technology companies, who are backed by the Iranian government.
In light of those allegations, the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam have sought to shift the question of Iranian government backing back to the Innocence of Muslims film. "With a little searching, we still found the anti-Islamic offensive film on the Internet. Thus the chain of cyber attacks on U.S. banks will continue this week," they wrote in a Pastebin post previewing the fifth week of attacks.
Of course, the repeated calls by the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam for the Innocence of Muslims film to be excised from the Internet could simply be a red herring, given that it's unlikely that YouTube--or any other site used to host a copy of the film--would ever accede to such demands, unless a related DMCA copyright-owner take-down notice was filed by the film's owners. Given that the filmmakers apparently uploaded the clip in the first place, it's unlikely that such a DMCA takedown request would ever be filed.
In the meantime, at least one Egyptian Muslim cleric, as well as the secretary general of Hezbollah in Lebanon, have issued a fatwa against everyone who participated in the film, calling for their death. But the actors have said that the anti-Islamic content in the film was added in post-production via dubbing, and without their knowledge.
Why haven't leading banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, been able to block the DDoS attacks launched against them, despite having prior warning? According to security experts, it's because the attackers appear to have compromised high-bandwidth servers--potentially at service providers--thus tapping enormous amounts of bandwidth, which they're using to launch their attacks.
The attacks illustrate the changing nature of DDoS attacks, which today are more prevalent and formidable than ever before. According to an October 2012 report from Prolexic, a DDoS protection and mitigation service provider, in the third quarter of 2012--compared to the same time period in 2011--the total number of DDoS attacks had increased 88% and the average attack bandwidth increased 230%, with attacks of 20 Gbps becoming the norm. Interestingly, however, the average attack duration decreased--between the third quarters of 2011 and 2012--from 33 hours to 19 hours.
From the first days of the online banking attacks, hacktivists claimed to be leading a grassroots protest against the Innocence of Muslims film. Notably, a Sept. 18 blog post titled, "Come and support Prophet Muhammed on the Internet," urged to people to download attack tools--with download links to file-sharing websites provided--and use them to attack the Bank of America and New York Stock Exchange websites, in support of the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam.
According to Atif Mushtaq, a security researcher at FireEye, the blog asks people to participate in what is clearly an Anonymous-style, distributed DDoS attack. "They are asking people to download a RAR file containing an HTML file, and run it from their desktop," said Mushtaq. It's not clear, however, if anyone has actually downloaded or run the proffered attack tools. Even if they had, furthermore, they likely would have been an insignificant addition to the attacks' success, given the use of high-bandwidth servers to overwhelm banks' existing defenses. That suggests that the attackers enjoy substantial backing, and are much more well-organized than the typical grassroots endeavor.
"A blend of attack scripts and different techniques used in each campaign is another pointer to the likelihood that multiple, well-organized groups or individuals were behind these attacks," according to Prolexic president Stuart Scholly. The company has also found evidence that at least some of the servers used by bank attackers were compromised in May 2012, suggesting that Operation Ababil may have begun long before the release of the anti-Muslim film.
Iranian officials, responding to allegations made by U.S. officials that the Iranian government is directing Operation Ababil, have denied all involvement. In response, U.S. officials have highlighted the Iranian government's announcement earlier this year that it had created a military "cyber corps" to help the country block future attacks of the Stuxnet variety.
In February 2012, notably, Brig. Gen. Gholam-Reza Jalali (above), who heads the Passive Defense Organization of Iran (PDOI), reportedly said that "Iran has begun to operate its first cyber army," while in later interviews, he said that a new "cyber command" would help Iran "develop mechanisms for cyber defense in a way that we will be able to defend the country against new viruses." Might the country's cyber plan also include offensive operations?
Each of the recent DDoS attacks against U.S. financial institutions have this in common: The Izz ad-din Al qassam cyber fighters have claimed credit, and the same PHP-based toolkit, "itsoknoproblembro," has been used to launch at least some of the DDoS attacks involved.
First, the attackers must install the toolkit on targeted servers. "The malicious actors make use of Web application vulnerabilities on thousands of different Web servers in order to drop various flavors of the itsoknoproblembro PHP scripts into available directories," according to the Prolexic report. "Once the files are written to the server, attackers are able to access them to perform unauthorized system functions, check on the bot's status, or launch DDoS attacks."
DDoS attacks today focus both on infrastructure (layers 3 and 4) as well as applications (layer 7), according to Prolexic.
Unlike botnets, Prolexic said that itsoknoproblembro infections aren't managed using a command-and-control (C&C) server, in which infected endpoints retrieve commands from a botmaster. Instead, the itsoknoproblembro infections are controlled by pushing commands to them.
The versatile toolkit can be used to infect a number of different systems. "Itsoknoproblembro scripts have been discovered on servers hosting a variety of platforms, including Awstats, WordPress, Joomla, Plesk, and many others. For example, one of the more popular recent infection vectors is the exploitation of vulnerability within the Joomla Bluestork theme," according to the report.
Unfortunately for U.S. banks, or anyone else targeted via itsoknoproblembro, the vulnerabilities exploited by the toolkit remain hard to fix. "Cleanup efforts for itsoknoproblembro have been extremely difficult and taxing on security experts," according to Prolexic. "Coupled with outdated Web applications and inexperienced administrators, it will be extremely difficult to effectively remediate this infection." While further efforts are underway to find new ways to spot and block related attacks, so far there's been no quick-fix defensive measure discovered.
Supposed Muslim hacktivists aren't the only groups apparently gunning for U.S. financial institutions. Researchers at RSA recently warned of underground chatter they'd unearthed, suggesting that up to 100 botmasters were set to pool their resources--a few each, at a time--to launch Trojan applications that steal people's online banking credentials. The ultimate goal appears to be online bank log-in details for small and midsize businesses, allowing attackers to make fraudulent wire transfers.
After that warning, researchers at Trend Micro identified a list of 26 banks that will apparently be targeted.
The news of the forthcoming wire-fraud-transfer attack campaign follows the recent release of a joint alert by the FBI, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and the Internet Crime Complaint Center, warning of attacks that use "spam and phishing emails, keystroke loggers, and remote access trojans (RATs)," as well as variants of the Zeus financial malware, to target employees at financial institutions. According to authorities, attackers have successfully stolen between $400,000 and $900,000--at a time--by using stolen credentials to initiate wire transfers into overseas accounts. A similar heist was conducted earlier this month against the town of Burlington, Wash. Attackers successfully stole over $400,000 from the town's Bank of America account.
Supposed Muslim hacktivists aren't the only groups apparently gunning for U.S. financial institutions. Researchers at RSA recently warned of underground chatter they'd unearthed, suggesting that up to 100 botmasters were set to pool their resources--a few each, at a time--to launch Trojan applications that steal people's online banking credentials. The ultimate goal appears to be online bank log-in details for small and midsize businesses, allowing attackers to make fraudulent wire transfers.
After that warning, researchers at Trend Micro identified a list of 26 banks that will apparently be targeted.
The news of the forthcoming wire-fraud-transfer attack campaign follows the recent release of a joint alert by the FBI, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and the Internet Crime Complaint Center, warning of attacks that use "spam and phishing emails, keystroke loggers, and remote access trojans (RATs)," as well as variants of the Zeus financial malware, to target employees at financial institutions. According to authorities, attackers have successfully stolen between $400,000 and $900,000--at a time--by using stolen credentials to initiate wire transfers into overseas accounts. A similar heist was conducted earlier this month against the town of Burlington, Wash. Attackers successfully stole over $400,000 from the town's Bank of America account.
Who's behind the recent online attacks against U.S. banks? A Muslim hacktivist group calling itself the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam continues to take credit for the campaign of website disruptions. In recent weeks, its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, launched under the banner of "Operation Ababil," have disrupted the websites of some of Wall Street's biggest financial institutions, including Bank of America, BB&T, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, HSBC, New York Stock Exchange, Regions Financial, SunTrust, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo.
The hacktivist group's name refers to "Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a Muslim holy man who fought against European forces and Jewish settlers in the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s," according to The New York Times. In a similar vein, the website disruptions have been portrayed by some backers as a spontaneous, grassroots-driven online protest. But the actual identity of the attackers, as well as their motives or backing, remain the subject of much debate. Notably, U.S. officials--speaking anonymously in media interviews--have alleged that the group, despite what its own anonymous public pronouncements might claim, is nothing more than a front for an operation that's being run by the Iranian government.
In a series of Pastebin posts, the hacktivists have typically previewed which banks they'll be disrupting, as well as the dates and times of planned attacks. At the same time, they've broadly denied U.S. government officials' assertions, including allegations that the group has been involved in recent attacks that employed malware to obtain credentials for U.S. bank websites, allowing attackers to wire money from U.S. to overseas bank accounts, stealing up to $900,000 in one go.
So, what do the attackers want? According to their Pastebin pronouncements, their goal is relatively simple: they want to see the Innocence of Muslims film that mocks the founder of Islam removed from the Internet. A 14-minute clip of the film first surfaced on YouTube in July 2012, parts of which were broadcast on Egyptian television on Sept. 9, 2012.
The film has been attributed to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (a.k.a. Mark Basseley Youssef), 55, who was recently arrested in the United States on parole violations, which could see him returned to jail for two years. Nakoula, an Egyptian-born U.S. resident, was on parole after serving prison time for his 2010 conviction on bank fraud charges, and his alleged parole violations include using aliases, using a computer without supervision, and lying to his probation officer. Nakoula, however, has denied all charges against him. He's due back in court next month.
In the meantime, the attacks on banking websites show no signs of stopping.
Image credit: Photograph of Wall Street courtesy of Flickr user Michael Daddino.
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