JPMorgan and Other Banks Struck by Cyberattack

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/technology/hackers-target-banks-including-jpmorgan.html?_r=0

By NICOLE PERLROTHAUG. 27, 2014

A number of United States banks, including JPMorgan Chase and at least four other firms, were struck by hackers in a series of coordinated attacks this month, according to four people familiar with a developing investigation into the incidents.

The hackers infiltrated the networks of the banks, siphoning off gigabytes of data, including checking and savings account information, in what security experts described as a sophisticated cyberattack.

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Russian hackers began a month long online assault on Estonia in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation, after Estonian government workers moved a Soviet-era war memorial from the Estonian capital.

Still, security experts say that the stealthy nature of the recent attacks suggests that the motivation was not political.

The American banking sector has been a frequent target for hackers over the past few years, with the vast majority of attacks motivated by financial theft.

But not all of them. Over the past two years, banks have been targeted in a series of politically motivated attacks from Iran, in which a group of Iranian hackers flooded U.S. banking sites with so much online traffic — a method called a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack — that the websites slowed or intermittently collapsed under the load.

Hackers who took credit for those attacks said they went after the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad , and pledged to continue the attacks until the video was pulled from the Internet.

American intelligence officials said the group was actually a cover for the Iranian government. Officials claimed Iran was waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems.

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