University Federal Credit Union, the $1.5 billion institution headquartered in Austin, Texas, confirmed Friday that it was taken down “for around two and one-half hours” on Thursday in a cyber attack, acknowledged Sheila Wojcik, a senior vice president.
News of the incident first surfaced on a website, which proclaimed: “People's United Bank, UMB Bank and University Federal Credit Union failed to resist in front of Al-Qassam Group.”
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The website text continued: “U.S. Cyber Security acts was useless, in other words they could not stop Al-Qassam Group yet. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters hit 3 more American banks including People's United Bank, UMB Bank and University Federal Credit Union and simply made them completely out of reach.”
The site included a link to a screen shot showing the UFCU.org site was down.
UFCU confirmed to Credit Union Times that it had suffered the outage but the institution stressed that it had no details as to who had attacked, or even with what technologies. “We are still investigating,” said Wojcik, who declined to confirm that it was in fact a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
She also stressed that the credit union’s site was back up and fully functioning.
An outside expert, who requested anonymity, indicated that the website where the authorship was claimed has frequently been used by cybercriminals to brag about their exploits. He was unfamiliar with the details of the UFCU attack, however, and did not make any claims about the UFCU attack.
