A pro-Iranian cybercrime group has claimed responsibility for cyberattacks on Chime Financial Inc and Pinterest Inc that knocked the websites of both companies offline.
Chime, a San Francisco-based fintech company, was hit with a distributed-denial-of-service attack on April 1, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named to discuss internal information.
Customers expressed frustration on social media that they were unable to access services at the time. Chime disclosed the outage on its website but didn’t share the reason why.
A pro-Iranian hacking group later claimed responsibility for the attack.
"Chime recently experienced a brief disruption to Chime.com that was quickly resolved,” the company said in a statement. "The incident had no impact beyond the temporary website disruption, and no funds or member data were compromised.”
On Tuesday, Pinterest, a San Francisco-based social networking company, was also knocked briefly offline in a similar attack. Once again, the pro-Iranian group claimed credit.
"We are aware of a DDoS attack that targeted Pinterest,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg. "We mitigated this attack within minutes, and it impacted less than 2% of Pinterest traffic.”
The Iranian-aligned group also claimed to have recently attacked several American companies, but Bloomberg wasn’t able to substantiate the claims.
In addition, Iranian-aligned hackers have disrupted operational technology systems embedded in multiple organisations in the US critical infrastructure sector, according to a government advisory released on Tuesday.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that the hackers were conducting "exploitation activity,” resulting in "operational and financial loss” in the energy and water sectors across the country.
The advisory came after President Donald Trump warned that "a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” unless the country opened the Strait of Hormuz by the evening. Trump said later on Tuesday that his threat would be delayed by two weeks as negotiators seek a ceasefire deal. – Bloomberg
