CUNA made headlines with its warning about a planned May 7thDDoS – Distributed Denial of Service – attack that, said the tradegroup, was sufficiently worrisome that credit unions had to takesteps to be ready.

CUNA attributed the source of word of the threat to “chatterthat has been detected.”

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What chatter? That turns out to be comments not from theal Qassam Cyber Fighters – the group that has claimed the priorDDoS attacks that have knocked big U.S. banks and several creditunions offline in the past year.

Sources pointed instead to OpUSA, a shadowy hacktivist groupthat is affiliated with Anonymous.

OpUSA has claimed al-Qassam will be involved in the May 7attacks, but al Qassam – a group often said to be allied with theIranian government – has been less committal in its remarks.

As for what OpUSA has planned for May 7, the group has offeredits commentary onPastebin, the website of choice for DDoS-related announcements.(Warning: there is substantial off color language here,)

Aside from anti-Israel and anti-Obama commentary, thereare no real details of what is planned for May 7.

Anonymous, the supposed manpower behind OpUSA, is a group thathas had successful takedowns of public websites – recently theSpanish parliament's website became a victim. It has documentedcomputer skills at very high levels. But the exactrelationship between OpUSA and Anonymous is not presentlyknown.

So, what should a credit union do in the run up to May 7? Experts consulted by Credit Union Times indicated that atthis late date, not much could in fact be done to ward off anunknown attacker unleashing an unknown attack vector in a littleover a week.

Were budgets unlimited, much could be done, said the experts,but with a typical credit union's constrained IT budget, many willdecide their best course of action is to wait this one out and seeexactly what damage transpires on May 7.

In the vast majority of cases, DDoS also has not been associatedwith data breaches. It has been an outage, plain and simple, notedone expert who indicated it was not that different from going downin an electrical storm.

“Many – most – will decide to take this route,” he said.