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[Marp]

(Reuters) - A financial services industry group warned U.S. banks, brokerages and insurers on Wednesday to be on heightened alert for cyber attacks after Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase experienced unexplained outages on their public websites.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which is widely known as FS-ISAC, raised the cyber threat level to "high" from "elevated" in an advisory to members, citing "recent credible intelligence regarding the potential" for cyber attacks as its reason for the move.

An outside security contractor told Reuters that "massive" denial-of-service attacks had been launched against multiple banks, but declined to comment further.

Denial-of-service attacks seek to disrupt websites and other computer systems at the targeted organization by overwhelming their networks with computer traffic.

The move by FS-ISAC came just two days the FBI published a "fraud alert" advising financial services firms that cyber criminals may be disrupting service to their websites in a bid to keep banks from noticing a recent surge in fraudulent large-sized wire transfers. (http://1.usa.gov/SUGCDZ)

An FBI spokeswoman declined to say if the tactics cited in the "fraud alert" were related to the problems experienced by the two banks.

FULL ARTICLE

http://news.yahoo.com/jpmorgan-chase-consumer-website-intermittently-down-182802693--sector.html