After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't Been Hacked 315
Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack."
Financial pros speculate a different reason (Score:4, Interesting)
.
They, and several other "too big to fail" banks are literally broke, and a run on them would make that all too obvious. While some people observe that their market cap (total stock value) is less than their "book value" we must remember that they got FASB rules suspended, and are marking all the bad mortgages on their books to a fantasy that they'll all pay off, rather than the market value which reflects their real worth. Honest books would show they have negative value.
.
Since they are only propped up by loans from the fed, and FDIC doesn't have the money to back up the guarantees, the government sure ain't going to say anything that would cause a bank run, except for a couple of senators that have already mentioned in session only an idiot would still have an account with any of them. Do you suppose they know things they don't tell us? Count on it -- their own stock portfolios beat the best unprivileged managers every year, and by fat margins (double digit %) -- insider trading is legal for congressmen.
.
Run, don't walk, if you're in one of the TBTF banks, find a local or a credit union. You've been warned. This won't end pretty. Some of them have bad paper exposure in the trillions, and it's not on the books because the rules were changed for the emergency. The bad stuff is still there....
Re:Its true... (Score:3, Interesting)
It depends on how you do it. If you pwn 10,000 PCs with code you wrote and DDoS someone with your home made botnet, it is indeed a hack.
However, I doubt this is a hack. Their servers are probably overloaded from all the people logging on to cancel their accounts. Why pay the 5 bucks when their competition doesn't charge? Durbin was right; this isn't a DDoS, it's a Netflixing. Their CEO is incredibly out of touch (like most bankers). I hope they go out of business.
They should listen to the antitea protesters who are now protesting wall street in 50 cities. People are really pissed off; wall street ignores us at their peril.