WASHINGTON Dozens of credit unions and banks around the country are preparing for what an international group of cyber criminals has promised as mass distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks tomorrow, May 7.
More than a dozen of the nation’s biggest credit unions are listed on a group of 159 institutions targeted for tomorrow’s attacks, which the hacktivists are calling OpUSA. The credit unions, which include Navy FCU, Pentagon FCU, BECU, The Golden 1 CU, Suncoast Schools FCU, American Airlines FCU, Alliant CU, America First CU, Security Service FCU, San Diego County CU, among others, were all contacted by NCUA last week to help them prepare for the threatened cyberattacks.
Other targets listed include: Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, PNC, Suntrust, Capital One, Key Bank, Comerica and BB&T, among others.
But experts say there may be little the targets can do to prevent their systems, particularly online, banking, from going offline. “They (the cyber criminals) have more bandwith they can consume than any credit union,” Kevin Prince, chief technology officer for Compushare and author of the 2011 book “Security 2020,” told the Credit Union Journal this morning.
He urged credit union targets to work with third party service providers to ensure that “everything that needs to be done is done upstream.”
He suggested the only thing targeted credit unions can do to block the cyberattacks is to redirect their domain names. That is, direct a domain name to a third party that has significant more bandwith and protection capabilities than the credit union. “This is about the only reasonable solution you can do,” said Prince, who has been working with an FBI task force to thwart the threatened cyberattacks.
