University Federal Credit Union, the $1.5 billion institutionheadquartered in Austin, Texas, confirmed Friday that it was takendown “for around two and one-half hours” on Thursday in a cyberattack, acknowledged Sheila Wojcik, a senior vice president.

News of the incident first surfaced on a website, which proclaimed: “People'sUnited Bank, UMB Bank and University Federal Credit Union failed toresist in front of Al-Qassam Group.”

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The website text continued: “U.S. Cyber Security acts wasuseless, in other words they could not stop Al-Qassam Group yet.Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters hit 3 more American banksincluding People's United Bank, UMB Bank and University FederalCredit 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 hadsuffered the outage but the institution stressed that it had nodetails as to who had attacked, or even with what technologies. “Weare still investigating,” said Wojcik, who declined to confirm thatit was in fact a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)attack.

She also stressed that the credit union's site was back up andfully functioning.

An outside expert, who requested anonymity, indicated that thewebsite where the authorship was claimed has frequently been usedby cybercriminals to brag about their exploits. He was unfamiliarwith the details of the UFCU attack, however, and did not make anyclaims about the UFCU attack.