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Iran Behind Cyber Attacks On U.S. Banks 306

New submitter who_stole_my_kidneys writes "Evidence suggests the Iranian government is behind cyberattacks this week that have targeted the websites of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America. The attacks are described by one source, a former U.S. official, as being 'significant and ongoing,' and looking to cause 'functional and significant damage.' Another source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks."
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Iran Behind Cyber Attacks On U.S. Banks

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  • Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by brian0918 ( 638904 ) <brian0918NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:28PM (#41414999)
    Maybe if we apologize to them more, they'll like us.
    • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:29PM (#41415019)

      Maybe if we poke fun of Islam a bit more, they'll actually succeed in eliminating the banks for us. Ha-ha, only serious.

    • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Cigarra ( 652458 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:30PM (#41415037)
      How about not doing things that need to be apologized for, to begin with?
      • Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:34PM (#41415097)

        Because we don't apologize to barbarians who stone women for adultery after being raped. And, yes, even in the cases of legitimate rape.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:48PM (#41415267)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)

          by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:09PM (#41415551)

          First of all, "we", the U.S., didn't do anything

          I guess someone has not been studying the history of US-Iranian relations:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat [wikipedia.org]

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-iraq_war [wikipedia.org]

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-contra_affair [wikipedia.org]

          It is not as though the Iranians started to consider us to be enemies without us having done anything to them.

          • You know the US has had some countries it has had a beef with in the past. The UK, Germany, Japan, and so on. You might want to examine their reaction, their relations these days.

            There is something to be said for "forgive and forget" rather than holding a grudge until the end of eternity.

            For that matter, were the US to apply the same logic they'd have plenty of reason to hold a grudge forever against Iran. The embassy hostage situation would be a good example. A gross violation of international and US law,

            • by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @09:10PM (#41418103)

              The UK, Germany, Japan, and so on

              In fact, the British attacked the US in 1812, and did not truly become our allies until the 20th century -- generations after the revolution. We helped to establish democratic governments in Germany and Japan.

              When it came to Iran, we went with the opposite approach: the elimination of democracy in favor of authoritarian dictatorship. The Iranians did not rebel against their democratic government, they rebelled against a tyrant who had US backing. There is a world of difference between what happened in Iran and what happened in Germany or Japan.

              There is something to be said for "forgive and forget" rather than holding a grudge until the end of eternity.

              Chances are that the Iranians would have forgotten their anger, if we did not keep angering them. After they overthrew the dictatorship we created (sadly, only to establish another tyranny), we started giving the Iraqis weapons to kill Iranians with. Then in secret, we also gave Iranian weapons to kill Iraqis with, basically escalating a war that resulted in many dead Arabs and Persians. We also have an embargo on Iran, we have sent numerous, sophisticated, and destructive malware packages to them (and have written those to target their computer systems) and we keep calling them our enemy. It is not as though they are still getting back at us for everything that happened 60 years ago; we just won't leave them alone.

              For that matter, were the US to apply the same logic they'd have plenty of reason to hold a grudge forever against Iran

              Which is basically what we are doing -- as I said, we are not leaving them alone, we are actively working against Iran. We never had a good reason to get involved with Iran in the first place, and we keep worsening the situation.

              try to make progress

              Let's start be reevaluating our approach to overthrowing governments. We screwed up with Iran and Iraq; let's try not to screw up again going forward (maybe we should be asking about the escalation of US military activity in South America).

        • The Muslim world needs to examine their own society, and come to a resolution concerning their own behavior.

          You mean like U.N. Resolution 16/18, or U.N. Resolution 62/154?

        • The Muslim world needs to examine their own society, and come to a resolution concerning their own behavior.

          The Islamic philospher Kahlil Gibran in the book "The Prophet" said the same thing in different words, but human nature is human nature and it's much easier to jihad flesh and blood infadels than it is to jihad your internal demons.

    • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by crazyjj ( 2598719 ) * on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:42PM (#41415211)

      Well, it Iran's case. It probably didn't help that we overthrew their democratically elected government, stole their oil for decades with a puppet regime, and now are sending in computer malware to blow up their centrifuges and assassinating their nuclear scientists.

      Such actions do tend to cause some animosity.

      • Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by berashith ( 222128 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:59PM (#41415413)

        oh, that was all so long ago... only half of the Iranian's currently living there are old enough to remember those things. Maybe more would be alive if we hadnt propped up their neighbor who was happily killing them with our chemical weapons, but again, that is history now.

      • Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by shentino ( 1139071 ) <shentino@gmail.com> on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:30PM (#41415751)

        Evil is evil no matter if it is provoked or not, and that applies to ALL sides of ANY moral issue.

      • There are some time gaps in your story as well as some interesting events that took place. Could your post have been any more one-sided? For one thing, how exactly is it stealing when many nations worth of companies invested in their oil extraction infrastructure but some how not worth mentioning when the Iranians Nationalized assets that belonged to foreign corporations?
        • Yes, and being surprised at people being mildly annoyed when a foreign nation basically destroys their government structure is not one sided. I just want to make sure I understand your argument: it is ok to subvert democratically chosen government to uphold the profits of a corporation?

    • by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      maybe if the US stops their cyber attacks they will stop too.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by cheesybagel ( 670288 )
      Given Stuxnet, several mysterious pipeline explosions [washingtonpost.com], assassinations, explosions at munitions depots, etc. I consider attacking banking websites pretty tame in comparison.
  • Iran, or... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:31PM (#41415055)

    ...someone who would like to frame Iran.

    • ... WHO ?!?!?

      • by Nyder ( 754090 )

        ... WHO ?!?!?

        God of course. and I mean, the Jewish God that guides the actions of that country Israel.

        Not really sure what that other god, Allah is up to though, probably something sneaky that involves lots of virgins.

        • It's all the same fucking god, dude. The god of the Bible. It's called God in your language, Deus in my language, and Allah in Arabic.
          In the Day of Reckoning he'll call the leaders of the three religions and ask them:
          "what the fuck was all that fuss about, shitheads? Did you bother to RTFM?"
          • In the Day of Reckoning he'll call the leaders of the three religion

            Why exclude Zoroastrians, Sikhs, and Bahais?

            Did you bother to RTFM?

            Which one of the three? Not to mention all the minor forks...

            In truth, however, I suspect that he'll rather say "u mad? cuz I did it all for teh lulz".

      • by Hillgiant ( 916436 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:02PM (#41415453)

        Surely the Doctor would not stoop so low.

      • ... WHO ?!?!?

        Why would the World Health Organization try to frame Iran for anything? Are they unhappy with Iranian physicians or what?

  • Good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:34PM (#41415105) Journal

    Iran is doing more to punish those criminals than our own government is. Thanks Iran.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hahaha, you think "those criminals" are the ones who will pay the cost for this? You are just adorable. I want to pinch your cheeks.

    • Bad karma doesn't make what Iran is doing right, but it does rob their victims of the moral high ground if they bitch about it.

  • Flag Please pass laws to protect our series of tubes now Government. Please keep us safe.
  • I wonder how and why (Score:5, Interesting)

    by circletimessquare ( 444983 ) <circletimessquare.gmail@com> on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:40PM (#41415187) Homepage Journal

    The brave cyberwarriors of the theocracy can on one hand fight for the glory of their dogmatic institutions, while using the technology that the infidels invented, that they wouldn't even possess, without assembly in infidel lands.

    How is God great when it is the godless who provides the tools used to prove God is great?

    • So if we fought a war against China, you'd advocate that we don't use gunpowder based bullets?

      • Where the idea came from originally doesn't matter much in the West, we accept ideas from everywhere. Iran purports to not have that same liberality.

    • I've had the same problem with televangelists for years...
    • The Persians have a long history of trade with other nations and cultures, and the Iranians have not simply forgotten that history. Iran as it exists today is screwed up primarily because of the US and the UK overthrowing a democratically elected government that was trying to nationalize oil concerns, as well as the US backing the brutal dictatorship that followed that coup d'etat, and the US supplying weapons to both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. The Iranians did not wake up one day and decide they wanted
      • yes, the usa and the uk did bad things in the cold war. so did the soviet union. in fact, every single goddam country in the world has a black mark on its past from some point in its history

        what does that mean? NOTHING. what the usa did in the cold war has zero, ZERO bearing on the beliefs and will and agenda of the actual iranians in charge of the actual country of iran today

        are iranians an angry hive of bees? dumb forces of nature? i don't think so. but you think so: according to you, iranians are not rea

        • by jjohnson ( 62583 )

          Go back to kuro5hin, moron. The current president of Iran was one of the students who took over the U.S. embassy in the revolution that overthrew the U.S.'s puppet ruler. The current Iranian leadership is in place just because they participated in that revolution. If you can argue with a straight face that their decisions today have "nothing" to do with that, then you're detached from reality. Do you think they're making decisions in a vacuum?

          Your mewling attempts to divorce action from motivation and h

          • see, i worked at the wtc until 9/11/2001. bin laden bombed the wtc, i lost my job. my entire life is now defined by that event. so, what i just wrote is not my responsibility, it is the responsibility of bin laden and saudi arabia

            i'm going to rise up politically and in the year 2040 i am going to violently suppress a revolution in the usa when i am in power. but again, not my fault, saudi arabia's fault, because of 9/11

            </sarcasm>

            do you see how fucking stupid this ignorant bullshit sounds?

            • by jjohnson ( 62583 )

              I see how fucking stupid your ignorant bullshit sounds. I don't see how observing that the current state of the mideast is heavily dominated by its recent colonial history is somehow either dehumanizing or infantilizing to Iranians.

              Talking about the chain of events and how earlier events trigger or motivate later events doesn't take away anyone's responsibility. Your bullshit does though: It says that America has no responsibility at all for Iranian hostility, which is both fucking incoherent and leaves

        • by danhaas ( 891773 )

          It's easy to forgive a war that you've won.

          • it's easy to say you are a victim, and blame all failings on some other person, time, or place. and take no responsibility for your own lot in life, even though that's the only way you ever win at anything

    • Surely this does in fact demonstrate that God is great indeed, if He can even guide the infidels to craft the weapons of their own doom, and then provide them just like that to the warriors of jihad - and often even for free! ~

  • by JabrTheHut ( 640719 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:49PM (#41415279)

    Maybe we can overthrow their government and install a brutal dictator who will torture and murder people with our approval.

    Maybe we can pay a neighbouring country to start a war with them. We could give that neighbouring country chemical and biological weapons and then accuse Iran of using them.

    We could impose crippling sanctions on them, denying them medicine and illegally seizing their assets where we can, and threatening anyone who trades with them.

    We could fund Sunni extremists to blow up cars in crowded markets, hoping to start a wave of terror.

    We could start murdering their scientists and academics.

    We could launch our own cyber attack on them.

    Well, we could do all these things again, as we've done them all at least once. Maybe,if we can't think of anything else, we can ask, exasperated, "Why do they hate us?"

    • No body hates anybody here. These are countries, not people. Countries don't actually have friends or enemies. Only interests.

      If they want us to stop setting their stuff on fire, they need to align their interests with ours. Until then, we'll keep inching that armada we've got off their coast ever closer until either they take a shot at us or somebody sneezes and then the war starts.
      • by Cigarra ( 652458 )

        If they want us to stop setting their stuff on fire, they need to align their interests with ours.

        How does the antelope align its interests with the lion's? Becoming suddenly suicidal?

      • They are people.

        Just not the citizens.

        A nation's word is expressed by whoever is in charge, to wit, the government.

        When a kingdom speaks, it is with the voice of the king, not the voice of the people. The only way the people get any say is if the king says they do.

    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      We could give that neighbouring country chemical and biological weapons
      citation needed

      We could start murdering their scientists
      That was Israel, not the US, it's unlikely the US would have approved if Israel had bothered to ask us.

      I'm not saying the US has been real friendly towards Iran, we've kind of been dicks to them over the last 60 years or so, but let's keep facts straight.

      • by Vainglorious Coward ( 267452 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @05:09PM (#41416105) Journal

        We could give that neighbouring country chemical and biological weapons

        citation needed

        How about the Senate report on U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq [gulfwarvets.com], amongst whose findings is "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile- system programs, including:(6) chemical warfare agent precursors; chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans); chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment"

        Is that fact straight enough for you?/P

        • But... we legitimately thought Iraq was being invaded by giant insects and we were doing our humanitarian duty to provide guided-missile-equipped pesticide factories. How could we have known?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21, 2012 @03:51PM (#41415311)
    You destroy their centrifuging equipment, they attempt to kick your in the bank. What ? youw ere expecting in impunity to attack a coutnry without that coutnry answering ?
  • by SuperCharlie ( 1068072 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:00PM (#41415425)
    With the endless parade of cash from Bernanke currently scheduled to the tune of $40 BILLION per month indefinitely, somehow, I think these poor abused banks will squeek through this. Hell.. they could buy every damn tech manufacturer then make them custom build giant golden cow shaped HFT machines the size of the statue of liberty and then still have enough bailout cash to fill every Olympic pool in the US with $100 bills.
  • propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dtml-try MyNick ( 453562 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:01PM (#41415441)

    I think this is the second or third accusation from the US to Iran about something or the other this week.

    This pastern of preparing people for another war again is getting a bit obvious by now,

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:09PM (#41415543)

      "We need to have a world court, staffed with judges representing all countries."

      We have had that for years. The US wants no part of it, because lots of war criminals are US citizens.

      • by jittles ( 1613415 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:37PM (#41415835)

        The US probably could not legally be a part of such "World Court" without violating the US Constitution. Certainly the only way it would ever remotely be constitutional is if it were a ratified treaty, approved by the legislature and signed by the executive branch. There is little chance of that happening, and probably for good reason. There is no reason that a government shouldn't be able to enter into negotiations to resolve disputes with other countries, and certainly other countries should be free to sanction any country they choose, but to have some third party enter two entire nations into binding and un-appealable agreements does not sound very smart. How can you say that any of the judges are unbiased or fair? Because I know no man or woman who is unbiased, and most are not fair.

        And what force ensures that people hold up their end of the judgement? The UN? The UN wasn't set up in a way that instills faith in its abilities to end disputes, or to enforce judgements.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • It would be a nice start even if said court didn't have any means to enforce the judgement, and they would not be binding on the countries. Even the mere existence of such a judgement can be a powerful propaganda piece in and of itself. Russian dissidents have been using ECHR that way for years with considerable success - Russia could technically withdraw from it and just ignore the judgments, but it would lose prestige by doing so.

    • by Cigarra ( 652458 )
      Uhm, there is one already [icj-cij.org]. The US opted out, thank you very much. You don't get to bully everyone if you have to be responsible for your acts.
  • by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:14PM (#41415583) Homepage Journal
    From TFA:

    A group of purported hackers in the Middle East has claimed credit for problems at the websites of both banks, citing the online video mocking the founder of Islam. One security source called that statement "a cover" for the Iranian government's operations... Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.

    ... and of course, if an anonymous coward says it, it must be true!

    A ["]conservative["] website, FreeBeacon.com, initially reported on the Pentagon analysis, quoting it as saying, “Iran’s cyber aggression should be viewed as a component, alongside efforts like support for terrorism, to the larger covert war Tehran is waging against the west.” U.S officials did not deny the FreeBeacon report when queried by NBC News.

    Uh... it's not really 'aggression' when it's in response to a previous, unprovoked attack, is it? I think the phrase you're looking for is "the best defense is a good offense."

    The former head of cyber-security for the White House testified Thursday that “we were waiting for something like this from Iran.”

    So... US/Isreal invades Iranian territory, hacks their computers causing millions in physical damage to equipment, murders Iranian nationals within their own borders with drive-by bombings, sanctions, constant threats and saber-rattling... but Iran and their allies are the terrorists for allegedly perpetrating a DDoS attack on a couple outward-facing bank websites?

    Yea, I think most bullies would, at some point, realize that at least one of the people they've fucked with will eventually retaliate.

  • by TechwoIf ( 1004763 ) on Friday September 21, 2012 @04:16PM (#41415607) Homepage
    Now maybe the banks will start fixing there sites. Poor security, only works in IE, etc.
  • It's a couple of Too Big To Fail banks. They aren't the most popular organizations just now. Is it a massive high-bandwidth DDOS? Or some Anonymous-esque probe? It may be Iran, I don't know, but lacking evidence, Iran wouldn't be my first choice of perpetrator for something like this.

  • should be recruiting Iranians...

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