Bank of America Site Not Hacked

Online Banking Issues Were Isolated, BofA Says
Bank of America Site Not Hacked
As of Monday, Bank of America says sporadic problems with its website, which cropped up Friday, are not related to any online breaches or attacks. The BofA website is now functioning normally.

On Friday, the $2.36 trillion bank posted a message on its homepage, saying the site was temporary unavailable.

Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for BofA, says "some" BofA customers reported having trouble accessing their online banking accounts. But "a majority of our customers can bank online."

Julie McNelley, a fraud analyst at Aite, says the timing of the outage is curious, coming only one day after BofA announced plans to begin charging fees associated with debit-card purchases.

"It wouldn't be the first time a hacktivist group used a denial of service attack to express their displeasure over a company policy," McNelley says.

But Burke says the bank's site troubles are not related to a hack or a breach, and that the site issues have been sporadic.

In November 2010, a similar outage struck BofA and several other institutions, including Chase, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo. Given the number of institutions affected, industry pundits speculated that the November outage was linked to a third-party or core processor that manages online banking for various institutions.


About the Author

Tracy Kitten

Tracy Kitten

Former Director of Global Events Content and Executive Editor, BankInfoSecurity & CUInfoSecurity

Kitten was director of global events content and an executive editor at ISMG. A veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, she covered the financial sector for over 10 years. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2010, she covered the financial self-service industry as the senior editor of ATMmarketplace, part of Networld Media. Kitten has been a regular speaker at domestic and international conferences, and was the keynote at ATMIA's U.S. and Canadian conferences in 2009. She has been quoted by CNN.com, ABC News, Bankrate.com and MSN Money.




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