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Could a state actor be at play? U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, without offering any proof, said he believed the assaults were carried out by Iran in retaliation for tightened economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.

only a handful of groups out there that have the technical ability or incentive

More unusually, the attacks also employed a rapidly changing array of methods to maximize the effects of this torrent of data. The uncommon ability of the attackers to simultaneously saturate routers, bank servers, and the applications they run—and to then recalibrate their attack traffic depending on the results achieved—had the effect of temporarily overwhelming the targets."This very well could be a kid sitting in his mom's basement in Ohio launching these attacks." "It used to be DDoS attackers would try one method and they were kind of one-trick ponies," Matthew Prince, CEO and founder of CloudFlare, told Ars. "What these attacks appear to have shown is there are some attackers that have a full suite of DDoS methods, and they're trying all kinds of different things and continually shifting until they find something that works. It's still cavemen using clubs, but they have a whole toolbox full of different clubs they can use depending on what the situation calls for."

The attack is described by one source, a former U.S. official familiar with the attacks, as being "significant and ongoing" and looking to cause "functional and significant damage." Also, one source suggested the attacks were in response to U.S. sanctions on Iranian banks.

There was no report of an attack on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Exploitation process relied upon a Java vulnerability (CVE-2013-2460) and after getting dropped into the target computer system, the malware detects the Java version installed on the operating system and based upon it requests the suitable exploit.

Wednesday's report exposes serious risks in what banks, mortgage companies, and other financial services call "knowledge-based authentication." Representatives from these services frequently rely on a list of about 100 questions such as "What was your previous address?" or "Which company services your mortgage?" when trying to determine if the person on the phone or filling out an application is the individual he claims to be. Ready access to the data stored by the data aggregators can make the difference between a fraudulent application being approved or rejected. Krebs goes on to recount a story told by Gartner fraud analyst Avivah Litan about a fellow analyst who witnessed an identity thief in action.