Patelco Credit Union confirms cyber attack

The San Francisco-based Patelco Credit Union just confirmed that its website was hit by a DDoS attack on Thursday. The member-facing part of the credit union's website was down for close to five hours, according to Credit Union Times.

Patelco CEO Ken Burns said the attack appears to have been a DDoS attack, a technique that floods a website host with meaningless information to overload it and cause it to crash.

A hacker group called Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters claims to have been behind the attack. The Iranian group has been behind a wave of DDoS attacks on financial institutions.

On the same day, University Federal Credit Union in Austin, Texas had a similar outage that lasted two and a half hours. The Cyber Fighters group also claimed responsibility for this attack though UFCU said they were not sure the source of the attack.

Both credit unions stressed that no member information was compromised and that their websites are back up and running fine.

Patelco has now entered into an agreement with a third-party vendor for DDoS mitigation to provide additional security in the future.

Cyber Fighters have now announced that they are suspending DDoS attacks on American financial institutions, but they haven’t said how long the suspension will last. The group says they have suspended the attack because YouTube took down a highly-viewed video that the group said was offensive to Islam.

The group said, "This is a clear indication of progress and establishment of logic instead of obstinacy. This positive move is a humanitarian effort and in line with paying respect to divine religions which has made billions of people love them; and it's a becoming and proper action. All of us — al-Qassam group, U.S. government, and even YouTube and Google's managers — carrying on such a wise action have contributed to this victory and progress.

"The al-Qassam cyber fighters lauds this positive measure of YouTube and on this basis suspends his operation and plans to give a time to Google and U.S. government to remove the other copies of film as well. During the suspension of Operation Ababil, no attack to U.S. banks would take place by al-Qassam cyber fighters."

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