Hackers Target Chase Banking Website in Denial of Service Attack

The Chase.com consumer website experienced sporadic outages this week – after being the target of at least one distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The most prominent recent outage at the Chase Bank website took place between 5 and 6:30 p.m. (ET) on Tuesday. The attack led to many JPMorgan Chase & Co. customers being unable to access their Internet accounts, according to The Los Angeles Times.

No personal data was compromised from the attack, the bank said.

DDoS occur after numerous hackers send traffic all at once to overload servers. The attacks often lead to a website losing service.

NBC News reported that a group which calls itself al-Qassam Cyber Fighters claimed responsibility for the cyber-attack against Chase. Last year, the group said it would target U.S. banks – but just on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, according to blog posts. The hackers are attacking the websites because of a video now on YouTube (News - Alert) which has been described as being anti-Islamic. It is called "Innocence of Muslims."

Al-Qassam Cyber Fighters said they’ll stop the cyber attacks if the video is taken off of YouTube. Portions of the video were taken down recently, and the group suggested before the Chase attack it would suspend its cyber-attacks.

Meanwhile, even though there were reports that the Chase website was operational as of midweek, there were reports on SiteDown.co that the log-on page for Chase.com wouldn’t load, the connection timed out, or the website was down altogether – of as Thursday morning.

Overall, when businesses find they are targeted by denial of service attacks there are different strategies to follow. Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University (News - Alert) and director of its Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, said some of the businesses will reroute customers to functioning services, TMCnet reported. Chase did that on Tuesday.

Still, other companies have so much server capacity they may not be brought down.

"Most companies don't like to talk about this very much," Cate told the Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind. "If you asked how many attacks there have been in the last year, no one, not even the federal government, knows the answer."