OpUSA Threatens Banks, Government

OpUSA Threatens Banks, Government

www.bankinfosecurity.com

Security experts say that OperationUSA, a coordinated online attack against banking and government websites slated for May 7, is a serious threat. As a result, organizations should be upping their distributed-denial-of-service attack mitigation strategies to guard against the attacks, which are being coordinated by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

(visit the link for the full news article)


Related News Links:

krebsonsecurity.com
www.decryptedtech.com
news.softpedia.com

I just became aware of this after checking my e-mail a few minutes ago. I just read and e-mail sent to me from my credit union where I recently paid off my car loan stating that "on May 7th, financial institutions may experience availability issues as part of another widespread DDoS attack rumored to be planned ..." and that I "might want to consider taking care of any critical financial needs" before then to "avoid any possible inconvenience."

After reading this, I of course immediately checked the news online and came across the article linked above and then searched ATS to see if anyone else had posted this, and no one had yet. Below is a link the supposed "transcript" (I'm assuming e-mail" sent from "OPUsa" whoever they are supposed to be. The link is provided on the main source listed above.

www.bankinfosecurity.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I hadn't heard or read anything about it and don't really have anything of substance to add but will be keeping my eyes and ears open online and this thread to see if anything develops.

S+F

reply to post by Time2Think


Things are starting to fall into place now.

I'm a web developer by trade and recently there has been a concerted attack against wordpress sites.
(wordpress powers upwards of 30% of ALL sites on the net).

I can speak from personal experience, ALL my clients sites have been receiving upwards of 150 attacks per day.
Here a quick article to get you up to speed. www.zdnet.com...

The difference between these attacks and the normal run of the mill ddos attacks where some poor soul downloads some malware that will then participate in a ddos attack is AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH.

The average person sitting at home with their personal computer doesn't really have access to much in the way of bandwidth, web servers DO.

So by extrapolation if you wanted to create probably the largest ddos attack ever seen on the internet you need to have access to WEB SERVERS in a coordinated attack, their pipelines are HUGE!

Eyes open people.

reply to post by creatives


Wordpress is a whole lot different to Sharepoint (what most banks use as a CMS) so I dont think an increase in WP attacks is related... I run WP on my own domain and have been receiving a lot of spam but no actual breaches as yet..

IMHO cyber attacks on banking infrastructure is more likely state-sponsored (NK? China? Iran? Iceland?) than an act of hactivisim.

reply to post by cartenz


It's just a matter of time, nothing is 100% protected, just takes that lucky or dedicated break to find the " hole " and worm in. Webservers have a lot of bandwidth but, I keep thinking of SETI and Sleeping Malware cells just waiting...

I'm really tired of Anonymous playing small potatoes with the DDoS attacks. How about they do some real hacking for once and release some critical information to the public that is being kept classified, but would implicate many high ranking officials in corruption? Until Anonymous steps their game up, I could care less about them.

Originally posted by Krazysh0t
I'm really tired of Anonymous playing small potatoes with the DDoS attacks. How about they do some real hacking for once and release some critical information to the public that is being kept classified, but would implicate many high ranking officials in corruption? Until Anonymous steps their game up, I could care less about them.

They do actually release information from some of their hacks. Usually gets pasted to a pastebin though. They also released a conversation between one of our intelligence agencies and one of the UK's talking about the group. There were some news articles about that one a couple years ago. They'll usually send out a link to a pastebin though when they've got something. Problem with that is that pastebin is just copy/paste text so doesn't really prove anything. They could've just written it. There was a hack that they did on some white supremacist groups here in the US a few years ago that they released a bunch of stuff for and that was very, very interesting to read as the supremacist groups referenced attempting to destabilize the country (not quite in those words but definitely their intent).

reply to post by cartenz


What security software are you using on your site/server to report on hack/attack attempts?
I'm guessing none.

Either that or you have been unbelievably lucky.

'They' are not hacking sites in the traditional sense of defacing or deleting pages. 'They' are uploading some code that allows them to access the server. They couldn't careless about the sites as such.

It's has nothing to do with the software that the banks are using, and everything to do with the proliferation of wordpress as the cms of choice these days.

Most website owners don't know the first thing about locking down their wordpress site, let alone the server.
If you are going to pull off the largest DDOS attack EVER seen you need access to a massive amount of bandwidth across a HUGE number of servers.

The OP has my eyes firmly trained on May 7th.

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Not good enough for me. I need real hard hitting evidence. Everything else is just fooling around and isn't accomplishing anything but making it really easy for the MSM to paint these guys are a bunch of criminals. If you talk to anyone about Anonymous (who doesn't frequent these boards) you'd be hard pressed to find someone who can name a few hacks that they claim responsibility for. I bet most people (if they know of any) will just cite the PSN hack a few years ago.

How much trouble could they actually cause? The only victims I can see from this are the people whos sensitive identity and financial info is getting plundered. A "project mayhem" style take out the banks thing is just really not realistic anymore.

I don't like how all these groups simply get thrown together as "Anonymous". If you take the time to read through the articles, there's actually several different groups mentioned, mainly ones out of Israel.

As far as anything actually happening or not, only time will tell.