Scale of financial institutions' cyberattacks unprecedented.

• Position: CYBERCRIME - Brief article

In late September 2012, a number of U.S. financial institutions' websites were victims of denial-of-service attacks. Massive amounts of traffic directed at the sites caused day-long slowdowns at Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and PNC Bank.

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According to a September 28 article on CNNMoney.com, security experts say the outages stem from one of the biggest cyberattacks they have seen to date.

"The volume of traffic sent to these sites is frankly unprecedented," said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of CrowdStrike, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks. "It's 10 to 20 times the volume that we normally see, and twice the previous record for a denial of service attack."

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said in a C-SPAN interview that he believed the attacks were launched by Iran.

"I don't believe these were just hackers who...