The hackers group Anonymous had apparently not made good by lateTuesday afternoon on its promise to take down nine major governmentwebsites and 133 financial institution sites – including 12 largecredit unions – in what it called “OpUSA.”

Representatives from credit unions on the target list, publishedApril 24 on Pastebin,said they had not experienced any website disruptions as a resultof the threated Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

And an executive at a major Internet security operation, whichincludes several hundred credit unions on its extensive clientlist, said, “The research community is not seeing any activitytoward the financial community yet.”

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Todd Camp, marketing communications analyst at the $5.6 billionAmerican Airlines FCU of Fort Worth, Texas said his 241,000-membercooperative has not, so far, experienced any problems.

It's the same story at the $27 billion State Employees' CreditUnion of Raleigh, N.C., according to President/CEO Jim Blaine, whosaid his credit union's systems are normal.

Teresa Halleck, president/CEO of the $6.2 billion San DiegoCounty Credit Union, reported her credit union has not experiencedanything out of the ordinary. However, Halleck said she's not justfocused on May 7.

“With today being the announced date, everybody gears up fortoday,” she said, “but it could happen any day. So, we aremaintaining a state of awareness.”

NCUA Public Affairs Specialist John Fairbanks said staffers workwith any known targeted credit unions to determine whether theyhave in place mitigation processes, a communications plan in theevent of a prolonged outage, and procedures for monitoring andlogging possible attacks.

The regulator has also provided information about differentforms of malware used by hackers, as well as the possible paths ofattack, such as email attachments, that could be used.

Fairbanks referenced a risk alert sent to federally insured credit unions in Februarythat provided steps to manage the risk posed by cyber attacks andmonitor threats.

“Cyber security has been an important area of focus for NCUA,”he said.

DDoS attacks disrupt a website or render it inoperable byflooding its server with communication requests. At least twocredit unions – Patelco CU in California and University FCU in Texas – were hitin recent attacks claimed by a group calling itself the al-QassamCyber Fighters.

According to USA Today “CyberTruth” blogger Byron Acohido, what “unfolded (Tuesdaywas) a flurry of defacements of random government and commercialwebsites around the globe. It appears none of these defacementsaffected organizations on the OpUSA list of targets. Most of thesites defaced thus far have no connection to the U.S. Theseincludes commercial websites in Europe, South America and evenChina.”

Acohido quoted Marty Meyer, president of Corero NetworkSecurity, as saying, “This does not seem to be a verywell-coordinated effort and seems to be a disparate group ofindividual hackers who are probing and looking for web apps thathave vulnerabilities.

“There is also a good possibility that the attacks are onlyloosely linked to Anonymous in order to generate attention.”