(NaturalNews) Chase.com online banking has been taken offline by a sustained cyber attack since last Friday, with its online banking website either completely unavailable or loading with extremely long wait times. UPDATE: Shortly after this story went live, Chase.com began responding in a timely manner. We will continue to monitor the Chase.com website to see if it stays up.
Interestingly, there isn't a single story covering this in the mainstream media that I could find. One of the world's largest banks has its website taken offline for over 72 hours and nobody covers it?
How many millions of people are unable to pay their credit cards, check account balances and initiate account transfers? That this is not being reported in the press is highly suspicious. Is the long-feared cyber attack assault now under way that will bring U.S. banks to their knees?
Far beyond maintenance: This is a cyber attack
The banking site going down and staying down for over 72 hours is clearly more than just a maintenance issue. Maintenance windows typically last only a few hours and are scheduled to take place during the late night hours. But Chase.com has been compromised 24 hours a day beginning last Friday.
Because the holiday shopping season has already begun, Chase bank would obviously not willingly allow their online banking to stay down for such an extended period of time. The duration of the outage is near-proof of the cyber attack.
If you have a Chase.com account, try logging in to chase.com right now and see if the site comes up for you.
Why Chase Bank is a juicy target for cyber attacks
Why would cyber attacks target Chase? There are all sorts of reasons, and it depends on who is doing the attacking.
If a foreign government is behind the attack -- such as North Korea, China or Russia -- they might be trying to disrupt the U.S. economy by compromising one of America's banking giants. If this were the case, I would expect to see more of a coordinated attack targeting multiple banks at once.
If more traditional hackers are behind it, they might be trying to steal account emails and passwords again, just like they did earlier this year. But this sort of hack wouldn't normally involve the website being down for such an extended period of time.
Someone might be waging a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service) against the bank, but such an effort would require a very large (and very expensive) effort, and it's not clear what it would accomplish other than the harming of Chase's reputation.
If Anonymous is behind the attack -- and I have no idea if they are -- they might be trying to send a message about evil banking corporations exploiting the people.
At this point, it's impossible to know who's behind it, but we do know that the attack is working. Chase.com online banking has been severely compromised for several days, and if this continues, Chase is going to start losing customers by the thousands.
It's not hard to imagine that the Chase 1-800 customer service lines are already melting down, probably with extremely long wait times and angry customers. People who can't make their payments, after all, are about to be hit with credit score penalties that could affect their ability to acquire financing on a house or a car. People who have funds being held in Chase checking or savings accounts are unable to transfer those balances out via online banking.
Is your money safe with Chase?
All this makes me seriously question whether anybody's money is safe with Chase bank. What if Chase really suffers a catastrophic outage and loses account balances? What if the attack is sustained and continues for another week, or even another month?
Maybe they'll fix the website today, but how can they stop it from going down again? My advice to all Natural News readers is that if you do bank with Chase, you may want to consider diversifying your accounts to other banks as soon as possible. Having all your eggs in one bank, so to speak, could be extremely risky in an era when hackers can successfully take an entire banking system offline for days at a time.
About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is the founding editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's No. 1 natural health news website, now reaching 7 million unique readers a month.
In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.
With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource now featuring over 10 million scientific studies.
Monday, November 10, 2014
About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is the founding editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's No. 1 natural health news website, now reaching 7 million unique readers a month.
