The Regions Bank website was hit by a cyber attack on Friday. Thankfully, the attack only took the site down for a small time frame and it was up and running by afternoon.
A spokesperson for the bank reported that the site was disrupted by a distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attack. Along with the site, debit cards were also affected , notes The Birmingham News.
While the DDoS attack only affected one small bank, it brought to light the larger issue of banks being hit by cyber attacks. Regions Bank spokesman Mel Campbell added of the situation:
“Attacks like this have not been uncommon this year for us, or frankly any other major banks — the large regionals or the money center banks.”
And the attack on Friday could have been worse. While the Regions website was only down for a few hours, on US banks have suffered cyber attacks that shut down their sites for days.
No one has come forward to claim the attack on Regions. However, Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam have claimed responsibility for several attacks on US banks in the past, notes Alexandria Town Talk.
Softward giant Symantec announced this year that cyber attacks, like a DDoS, against US businesses have jumped by 42 percent in the last year. A DDoS attack works by using thousands of computers to pull up a single website at once and requesting actions to overload the site. The attack either slows the site to a crawl or completely crashes it.
Campbell explained, “These are coordinated efforts to flood a website. they can accomplish their goal even if they don’t crash the sites because their goal is to disrupt the customers who use that site.” A DDoS attack is, essentially, a simple tool hackers can use to disrupt the sites of their targets, disrupting business.
Campbell assured that the DDoS attack on Regions Bank did not put any customers’ information at risk.
