[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Capital One has joined the club.  Unfortunately for the bank, that club has been defined by recent cyber attacks or technical issues.

Like Bank of America, US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, and Wells Fargo, Capital One experienced a denial of service attack on its website Tuesday afternoon.  The McLean, Va.-based bank is the 12th largest U.S. bank by assets.  [See Behind the News story, "US Bancorp, PNC Under Attack".]

Who? The "Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters” were responsible for last month's attacks against BofA, Citi, and the New York Stock Exchange, causing websites to slow or even become inaccessible for some users.  However, customers needn't worry, a spokesperson said:

"At this point, we have no reason to believe that customer and account information is at risk."

When? The bank's consumer website started experiencing slowness and intermittent outages around 1:45 p.m. ET Tuesday. The spokesperson said that most of its online services had been restored by around 4:30 p.m.and all other systems remained unaffected.

Why? A day earlier before Capital One was hit, a hacker group claiming to be associated with a terrorist group issued a threat in retaliation for an anti-Islam film released last month.

Next?

• The "Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters", in a blogpost late Monday, said it would target Capital One on Tuesday, SunTrust on Wednesday, and Regions Financial on Thursday, after the release of what it called "an insulting film," a reference to the ‘Innocence of Muslims’ trailer that ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad.
• In addition, the group threatened to pursue more cyber attacks next week and has long said it will not stop until the video is removed from the Internet.
• Earlier posts from the group claimed the attacks would expand to eventually include "other evil countries like Israel, France and the United Kingdom."

FlashPoint Partners, a security company that specializes in these types of attacks, said it's only going to get worse. The fresh round would "likely be limited to large scale DDoS attacks."

C-I Note: If cyber attacks are not limited, but don't affect customer and account information, should this nuisance really bother customers?   Is it tantamount to a long line at the grocery store?

For further details, go to [Fox Business, 10/9/12].