Iran Targets US Banks, While Privacy Groups Target NSA

The wave of service disruptions to several major US financial institutions are widely attributed to Iran. These distributed denial of service attacks have grown so serious that US banks have asked the National Security Agency for help.

However, privacy advocates tell us who we should really be worried about: "'The dual mission of the NSA, to promote security and to pursue surveillance, creates an intractable privacy problem,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center."

I'm more focused on the actual attacker. Assuming it is Iran, as I do, what do these attacks mean? One thing is certain, they're the opposite of the cyber Pearl Harbor everyone's talked about. Unless Adm. Yamamoto called up the Navy on December 7, 1941, and said, "We'll be attacking Pearl Harbor for an hour and then the Philippines for an hour, but only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays." Because that's how the bank attacks are going – short duration,