Expert fingers DDoS toolkit used in bank cyberattacks

01.10.2012
Cyberattackers who disrupted the websites of U.S. banks over the last two weeks used a highly sophisticated toolkit -- a finding that points to a well-funded operation, one security vendor said on Monday.

Prolexic Technologies said the distributed denial of service (DDoS) toolkit called itsoknoproblembro was used against some of the banks which included Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Each of the banks was struck on separate days.

The attackers, who called themselves Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, claimed to be hacktivists angry over YouTube video trailers made in the U.S. that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad.

Security vendors the attackers' claims, saying the assaults were far more sophisticated than those launched by typical hactivists, a term used to describe hackers who target websites in the name of a political or social cause. Prolexic's findings bolstered that belief.

The "itsoknoproblembro" toolkit is capable of simultaneously attacking components of a website's infrastructure and application layers, flooding the targets with sustained traffic peaking at 70 gigabits per second. In addition, Prolexic found that traffic signatures were unusually complex and therefore difficult to reroute away from the targets.