You Probably Missed This Story....

U.S. Warns of Terror Threat to Banking Web Sites
Posted by Sara Lepro on Dec 01 2006 05:48:29 PST

The U.S. government has issued a warning to the financial services industry about a possible internet-based attack by a terrorist group linked to al Qaeda, but said the attack was unconfirmed and posed no immediate threat.

....which may be a good thing or bad.

I think the American people are tired of terror alerts that fizzle out into nothing, and the television networks and stations are reflecting that in their coverage of stories like this.

Two years ago, this story would have been one of the top three on a telecast. I only heard about it this morning because I happen to spot a blurb on the ticker of BBCWorld News.

More details:

A person familiar with the warning said the threat, which came from a group called “ANHIAR al-Dollar,” called for attacks to begin today and run through December to avenge the U.S. for keeping terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. The group, whose goal is to destroy the databases of online stock trading and banking web sites, is said to have ties to al Qaeda.

Clearly, this will be a denial of service attack, which means that Al Qaeda will attempt to shut down a server by bombarding it with hits, thus making it next to imopssible to access the server to do your online banking.

More a nuisance than a terror attack, but should they have something else planned, some sort of virus/worm/trojan horse to embed in the banking software, this could be a major problem for people worldwide. Imagine going to your banking site and finding someone had cleaned out not just your account, but the accounts of everyone who banks there. Now imagine that happening to every bank in America.

The government would never be able to make good on all the funds they've guaranteed thru the FDIC, much less any other assets held in these accounts.

And we'd all be bankrupt. And the country along with us.

Just keep your eyes open, folks.