Today marks the sixth consecutive day Bank of America's website has been experiencing major disruptions, and while the bank steadfastly denies it was the victim of a cybercrime attack, security experts think otherwise.
Asked if hacking, malware of denial-of-service attacks are at the root of the nearly weeklong series of website problems, Bank of America (BofA) spokesperson Tara Burke told SecurityNewsDaily, "Every indication tells us that no."
Instead, Burke said the outages, which began Friday morning and have prevented customers from accessing their online banking information, were caused by three factors.
The first, Burke told SecurityNewsDaily, is that, "We've been developing and deploying new capabilities for our customers." The second possible cause, she said, is that the bank has been migrating online banking to a new platform, and the third is that BofA "experienced heavier than normal volumes on several days," although she added that the volumes "were not beyond our normal capacity."
"As of now, our site is operating normally," Burke said today (Oct. 6).
Cybersecurity experts do not agree that computer crime can be so easily ruled out. Internet security expert Steve Gibson told ABC News on Oct. 4 that he believes BofA's recent decision to charge a $5 monthly fee to debit card holders spurred hackers to launched denial-of-service attacks against the bank in protest.
"The only reasonable conclusion is that they are under attack," Gibson said. "A site of that size should be expected to handle huge volume with no trouble at all…the only time we ever see anything like this is when some major site has upset a group of hackers."