Clapper: U.S. shelved ‘hack backs’ due to counterattack fears
When the Obama administration was weighing a response to distributed denial-of-service attacks against U.S. banks in 2012, officials vetoed any retaliation because they were worried that the country’s digital infrastructure wouldn’t be able to deal with counterattacks, according to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The DDoS attacks, which slammed dozens of U.S. banks with increasing force, were traced back to Iran by U.S. intelligence, Clapper recently told the ICF CyberSci Symposium in Fairfax, Virginia. The attacks, launched from networks of compromised servers around the world, struck 46 major banks and other financial institutions — including Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Hundreds of thousands of customers were unable to access their bank accounts online and the victim companies spent tens of millions of dollars to mitigate the attacks. “We’d all built up quite a head of steam, [thinking] ‘By God, we’re not going […]
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