The bad news: yet more U.S. banks are falling victim to so-called Distributed Denial ofService attacks that flood websites with extraneous data,essentially overwhelming their ability to respond to legitimateinquiries.

U.S. Banccorp on Thursday joined a list of DDoS victims that includes Citigroup, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chaseand Bank of America.

The good news: the attacks have done no damage to the banks' ITinfrastructure, said experts.

The attacks have been claimed by Fizz ad-Din al-Assam CyberFighters, an Islamic group that said it is taking down banks inprotest of a short, anti-Islam film that has provoked rioting and violent protests in manyIslamic countries.

That group has posted authorship claims on Pastebin, a website often usedby hackers to announce their actions.

Experts do not necessarily believe those claims, but they do notsay they are false, either. Nobody currently knows who, or what, isbehind the attacks.

To date, no credit unions have indicated that they have beenvictimized. However, experts told Credit Union Times thatthe list of financial institutions that have suffered attack is infact larger than the list of those that have publicly acknowledgedthey have been victimized

Jeffrey Lyon, president of Los Angeles security firm BlackLotus, said in an interview that the actual hackers who haveconducted the attacks may be for-hire cyber criminals without anyparticular ideology.

Their skills, he said, are increasingly available for purchase.This makes tracking down exactly who is behind a specific attackthat much harder.

Matters may get still worse is the message from Matthew Prince,CEO of CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based security company. He said,“The attacks have been getting more sophisticated.” Defenders havehad to significantly up their game, according to Prince.

Prince added that “this appears to be a systematic attack on thenation's financial system. They appear to be probing smallerinstitutions now. This has the feel of someone working down a list,looking for weaknesses.”

Prince's message: no financial institution should believe it issafe from attack. The next phase is presently unknown.