Terrorism Takes on a New Form Causing Website Downtime for Big Businesses

It seems that terrorism has taken on a new form and the Bank of America and J.P Morgan Chase websites have been the most recent target of the terrorists’ cyber-attacks. While causing a bank’s website to go down may seem like a moral step up from the bombing and the harming of innocent victims, it can’t be ignored that this new form of cyber-terrorism has definitely had an impact on the American public. The terrorists who are behind the attacks are getting the attention they want and Bank of America customers are getting frustrated. As one Twitter member Paul Wheeler stated, “Bank of America's site stuck in prolonged slowdown. Why should the website be any different from the rest of the bank?”

When Bank of America’s website went down, customers weren’t able to access the online banking services provided by the institution. A group that claimed to be the cyber division of the terrorist group Hamas was quick to take credit for the outage of Bank of America’s website on Pastebin.com. So why did this group of extremists decide to attack Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase? According to the group, the low-budget movie “The Innocence of Muslims” was the fuel that ignited the fire. The terrorist group also exclaimed that we can expect more to come – the group plans to attack the New York Stock Exchange in the future in an effort to harm the “American Zionist capitalists”.

While the Pastebin.com website cited the “The Innocence of Muslims” as the reason behind the attacks, Sen. Joe Lieberman thinks the reasons behind the attack are more economical in nature. Lieberman told C-SPAN that he believes the attacks were the result of “increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions.” Whatever the reason may be, there is no denying that the attacks did indeed have an effect on the online presence of these banking industry giants.

Of course, while your website may not be a major financial institution, that doesn’t mean that it’s not susceptible to the attacks of cyber terrorists. If terrorists decide to take down the major DNS and website hosting companies (as we thought had happened with GoDaddy), then your site may indeed be affected by this new form of terrorism. The question is what can you do about it?

Alertra customers have already taken the first step. If your site goes down you’ll know about it – but knowing is only half the battle. You have to have a backup plan in place and you need to be able to put this plan into action quickly should your site go down due to DNS or web hosting outages. We can’t say if or when a cyber-attack will actually affect your site, but if it does you can make sure you’re ready and that Alertra will be there to notify you of the outage.