Iran denies role in cyber warfare attacks on US banks

Some US analysts warn not to rush to assign blame Tehran – Arabstoday Iran has denied US media reports it carried out cyber attacks on US banks, the official IRNA news agency said on Friday, quoting a statement from Tehran's United Nations mission .
"The Islamic Republic of Iran categorically denies any involvement in cyber attacks on American banks and denounces such methods which are a violation of the sovereignty of nations," the statement said.
US media reported on Wednesday that American financial institutions are being pounded with high-powered cyber attacks that some suspect are being orchestrated by Iran as payback for political sanctions.
"There is no doubt within the US government that Iran is behind these attacks," James Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce departments and now a computer security expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS], told the New York Times.
While the identities of those behind the online onslaught officially remain a mystery, it was clear they were using a potent new weapon for slamming bank websites with overwhelming numbers or requests for information, reports said.
The attackers infected datacentres used to host services in the Internet "cloud" and commandeered massive computing power to back so-called Distributed Denial of Service [DDoS] attacks, according to security experts.
DDoS attacks have been a basic hacker weapon for quite some time, but they have typically involved using armies of personal computers tainted with viruses and coordinated to make simultaneous requests at targeted websites.
"They are essentially going from a pistol to a cannon," Radware vice president of security solutions Carl Herberger said.
The top 20 US banks were hit on Wednesday with a third wave of attacks, each of which has been preceded by a claim of responsibility by a group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters.
The attacks began in September last year, according to Radware, which specialises in commercial computer security and has been investigating the cyber assaults.
It appeared that no money was taken in the attacks, but Herberger warned that the full extent of the damage had yet to be assessed.
However, John Bumgarner from the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit group that studies the impact of cyber threats, cautioned those rushing to assign blame for the attacks.
"These attackers are using the anonymity of the cyber space to mask who they are," Bumgarner said. "There is not irrefutable evidence that the Iranian government was responsible."
Source: AFP