JP Morgan Chase Blasted Offline during DDoS attack

JP Morgan Chase is recovering from a DDoS attack that knocked it’s website, and online banking offline on Tuesday, making them the latest victim in a wave of DDoS attacks against financial institutions.

Initially, the DDoS prevented access completely for some customers, and then the attack created intermittent outages and connections that were sluggish and slow. Customers were greeted with a notice on Chase.com that simply stated that the site was “temporarily down.” Mobile banking was unaffected by the attack, Chase said.

The bank confirmed the DDoS attack to the media, but would not, or could not disclose technical details such as peak traffic or length of attack. As of Tuesday evening, Chase.com was working as normal.

Earlier this month, a group calling itself Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters, promised new DDoS attacks against the finance sector, having previously targeted several American banks successfully. At the time their warning was delivered, Bank of America, PNC Bank, Wells Fargo, and Citibank were all having connection issues or were offline entirely. 

Earlier this year, a study by the Ponemon Institute said that 64% of IT staffers working within the financial sector said that their banks had suffered at least one DDoS attack within the previous 12 months, and 78% of those respondents said that DDoS attacks will either continue or increase in 2013.

“The belief that traditional perimeter security technologies such as firewalls are able to protect against today’s DDoS attacks is lulling not only financial institutions but organizations across every sector into a false sense of security,” said Marty Meyer, president of Corero Network Security, the company that commissioned the Ponemon study.

“Many Organizations assume traditional firewalls can provide protection against DDoS and zero-Day exploits at the perimeter, yet this is not what they were designed to do and therefore attacks are still getting through.”