A group of jihadists with links to al Qaeda have called for attacks on the U.S. financial infrastructure for the month of December, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a Cybersecurity Bulletin.

The threats, posted on a Web site, have not been given much credence. The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) continued to keep its Cyber Threat Advisory rating at low, its lowest level. Even the DHS stressed that the bulletin had been intended to merely advise interested parties of the claims and "was issued out of an abundance of caution."

"There is no information to corroborate this aspirational threat to the financial and banking sectors," a DHS spokesman told SecurityFocus.

While various what-if scenarios have been created for possible terrorist attacks through the Internet, most security experts believe that the threats from physical attacks far outweigh the potential harm from cyber attacks.

However, attacks through the Internet could pose some threat to the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that control many industrial devices, as well as energy trading networks and financial networks. A recent mock cyberterrorism exercise showed that many parts of the nation's critical infrastructure are not well prepared for an attack.

The DHS did not disclose on which site the threats were made.



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