The brief downtime of websites for a couple of major American banks hardly seems like the height of ambition, but US officials are still pretty sure they can blame the whole thing on the Iranian government.
The problem is there’s already been a claim of responsibility. A hacker group based in the Middle East claimed they carried out DDoS attacks on the banks’ websites as a form of protest against the YouTube trailer for Innocence of Muslims.
The officials are dismissing this explicit claim of guilt, however, saying they figure it is probably a “cover” and betting instead that Iran is doing this as some sort of retaliation for US banking sanctions against them.
But why would Iran bother? The attacks on the two sites didn’t even bring them completely down, leading only to some “slowness” on the websites and difficulty accessing them for a few hours. This hardly seems like the sort of thing a major nation would bother with.
