Anonymous Claims HSBC Take down, Threatens More British Banks.
Anonymous Claims HSBC Take down Threatens More British Banks.
Update:
Contrary to HSBC's claim, Fawkes Security said they did in fact steal sensitive
debit card information for 20,000 accounts, but have not yet provided proof.
The group also named the Electronic Diversity Visa Lottery website as a future
target. The site is a resource for non-citizens seeking work authorization in
the United States.
The multinational London-based bank HSBC yesterday (Oct. 18)
became the latest to have its website knocked offline by hacktivists.
But it's not clear exactly which hacktivists did it, now that a
group with ties to the Anonymous hacking collective has claimed responsibility
and said it has plans to target other U.K. banks.
"Banks are the sole cause of our current worldwide economic
problems. They deserve to get hit. RBS Lloyds TSB and Barclays are next," Fawkes Security told TechNewsDaily via Twitter.Initial
reports assumed that the HSBC attack was part of the month-long campaign
launched by an Islamist group against U.S. banks.
Yet Fawkes Security claimed ownership of the attack on Paste bin and on an announcement on their Twitter
feed hours before the
HSBC outage was first reported. It was no smoking gun, but it did lend their
claim some credibility.
Despite
Fawkes Security's claim, Fox Business reporte that that the Islamist group, which
has targeted American banks in response to the "Innocence of Muslims"
YouTube video, had claimed responsibilitfor this latest attack.
"The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters took responsibility for the attack
that at points crippled users' access to HSBC and other HSBC-owned
properties on the Web," the Fox Business report said.
The Qassam Cyber Fighters' most
recent post on Pastebin is
dated Oct. 16 and said only that "the chain of cyber attacks on U.S. banks
will continue this week."
The posting made no mention of HSBC, which is based in London
and Hong Kong and has only a regional presence in the United States. The
Islamist group has usually named its targets before attacking them.
The
attack "affected a number of HSBC websites around the world," HSBC said in a statement today (Oct.19) but assured customers
that their data had not been compromised.
HSBC customers reported outages on the HSBC UK and First Direct
sites which were a result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Other reports indicated that the U.S. site was down as well.
The DDoS attacks began
at about 3 p.m. Eastern time yesterday and continued for seven hours,the Register reported. All sites are once
again fully functional, an updated HSBC statement read.
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