A look at the history of cyber attacks from Iran on the banking system.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

As the war in the Middle East intensifies, one risk facing American banks is the possibility of cyber attacks by hackers linked to Iran.

There is some historical precedent for this. From late 2011 to mid-2013, nearly 50 financial institutions in the U.S. were attacked repeatedly by a group of hackers aligned with the Iranian government. The attacks disabled bank websites and prevented customers from accessing their accounts.

Rafe Pilling with the cybersecurity firm Sophos describes what those attacks look like.

They were distributed denial of service attacks. So they had infected, compromised a large number of computers on the internet, and we're using the combined power of those computers to make a large volume of requests to specific banking websites at a specific time in order to overwhelm those banking servers and make them unavailable to the bank's customers.

What happened? Were they overwhelmed? At the time, it was intermittent. They were able to

muster a significant volume of traffic, certainly for the time. There was a degree of disruption

for these financial services organizations.

They were certainly very concerned about it, concerned about how it looked, how was perceived

by their customers, and disruption to deliver their services to their customers, as you

would expect.

Yeah.

How did it affect customers, if you know?

So the main issue was the unavailability of websites, retail banking sites, business banking sites, at particular point when these denial of service attacks were going on.

And there are things that organizations can do. They can try and filter the income and volume of requests,

recognize the nature of the malicious traffic

and try and sift it out from legitimate traffic from users.

And this is sort of an ongoing battle that was happening at the time to try and mitigate

the impact of these attacks.

The attacks we were talking about, they started more than a decade ago, which is basically a lifetime in tech time.

How have cyber warfare capabilities in Iran evolved since then?

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