OpIcarus: Anonymous shuts down Bank of England and 12 more international banks

Hacktivist collective Anonymous continues its assault, titled OpIcarus, on the banks of the world with further DDoS attacks on 13 additional international banks. Among others, Anonymous also claims to have shut down, what appears to be the Bank of England's internal email server – mail.bankofengland.co.uk – which at the time of writing was still down.

IBTimes UK reached out to the Bank of England, but has not got a response until the time of writing.

Anonymous affiliated hackers going by the name of s1ege and Scrub posted several tweets claiming to have shut down various international banks in the span of four days. On 9 May, s1ege tweeted about shutting down the National Reserve Bank of Tonga and attacking the Central Bank of Sweden the following day; while Scrub tweeted about bringing down the website of the Central Bank of Bhutan.

On 10 May, the websites for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Central Bank of Montenegro also appeared to be briefly down, which s1ege boasted about on Twitter. Yet another Twitter account posting new reports about OpIcarus also boasted about shutting down the website of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. The next day yet another tweet talked about shutting down the Central Bank of Jordan.

However, the most number of banks were hit on 12 and 13 May. Six banks, including the Bank of Korea, the Central Bank of Myanmar, the Central Bank of Lao, the Bihar Gramin Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Bank of England appeared to have their websites taken offline for a brief period. The exploits were once again posted on Twitter by s1ege and scrub.

S1ege, believed to be a member of the Ghost Squad branch of Anonymous hackers, opened up about the motive of targeting international banks in an interview. He said that the main focus of launching the cyberattacks was to "start an online revolution" to retaliate against the "elite banking cartels [are] putting the world in a perpetual state of chaos." According to the hacker, all banks are potential targets. However, the focus for future attacks will be on "NASDAQ, NYSE and Paypal".

At the time of writing, the websites for the Central Bank of Bhutan, the Central Bank of Myanmar, the Bihar Gramin Bank, the Central Bank of Montenegro and the Bank of England (mail.bankofengland.co.uk) were still inaccessible.

None of the affected banks have disclosed information about the extent of damage the cyberattacks may have caused. Every hack appears to have affected the websites in varying degrees, with some websites being down for a few minutes while others remaining inaccessible for hours. Anonymous' campaign against international banks is expected to continue throughout the month of May and IBTimes UK will be covering the attacks.