[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Houston, we have a problem.

Is homeland security getting more vulnerable or are cyber attackers getting smarter?  US Bancorp and PNC Financial Services are the latest banks to face the so-called denial-of-service campaigns that continue making their rounds throughout the online community.  On Wednesday, customers of those banks were having trouble accessing the banks' Web sites.  Similarly, Wells Fargo & Co customers had intermittent access issues on Tuesday, and PNC clients suffered difficulty logging into the bank's Web site on the first attempt.

Is Iran responsible? This is the explanation proposed by Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, during a taping of C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program.

"I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has its own developing cyber attack capability." -- Senator Lieberman, referring to the covert arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Only last week did Reuters issue a report detailing Iranian hackers repeated attacks on Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Citigroup Inc over the past year as part of a broad cyber campaign targeting the United States.  This was preceded by a similar posting last week warned of attacks against Bank of America Corp and the New York Stock Exchange.  On pastebin.com, the poster said the attacks will continue until the film that had stirred anti-US protests across the Middle East was removed from the Internet.

"Obviously, it looks coordinated." -- Jeff Herdell, founder of a Web site called Sitedown.co, which has been tracking customer complaints about the banks' Web sites.

In the aftermath of a cyberattacks, banks face potential damage to:

• damage
• customer retention
• revenue
• costs, as banks have to add staff to handle phone calls and pay for additional network bandwidth

For further details, go to [NY Post, 9/26/12].