(flickr.com/consumerist)

U.S. officials are still convinced that continuing denial of service (DDoS) attacks against American banks by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters are cover for state-sponsored cyber sabotage by Iran, according to a report in today's New York Times.

The Times reports that the U.S. doesn't believe the hacking group's repeated claim they are targeting banks because the anti-Islam video Innocence of Muslims hasn't been taken off the Internet:

But American intelligence officials say the group is actually a cover for Iran. They claim Iran is waging the attacks in retaliation for Western economic sanctions and for a series of cyberattacks on its own systems. In the last three years, three sophisticated computer viruses — called Flame, Duqu and Stuxnet — have hit computers in Iran. The New York Times reported last year that the United States, together with Israel, was responsible for Stuxnet, the virus used to destroy centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

The U.S. has good reason to suspect state sponsorship. The al-Qassam cyber attacks have used compromised cloud computing services, which they infect with a malware package called "Itsoknoproblembro."

The malware turns infected servers into what researchers call "bRobots." Funny as the name might be, bRobots are serious business. A hacked data center filled with bRobots gives the attackers enough firepower to take down even the largest websites. As the Times reported, one bank with a substantial 40 gigabit Internet service was easily knocked offline, and others reported DDoS traffic peaks of up to 70 gigabits.

On Tuesday, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters published a new post on Pastebin in which they said the attacks will continue. They offered a complex set of equations related to the current views and likes of Innocence of Muslims and wrote that the reasoning in allowing the video to remain on the web was "the result of direct role of Satan and evil shadow in Zionism spirit and approach of thinking."

As of Wednesday morning, the top four sites on "outage watch" at Site Down were Bank of America, Citibank, Capital One and Fifth Third Bank.

Nope.

Hey, remember that Citi-branded public bike-sharing program that was supposed to launch this month? Well, don't hold your breath. The launch has been delayed until some point in the future. Why is that? We're afraid the software just does not work.

Maybe Facebook really is sucking the city dry of its supply of engineers.

Capital New York reports that Hizzoner provided a little detail this morning: "The software doesn't work yet, and we're not gonna put it in until it does, period," he said, adding:

"The one thing is, the company that does it had some software problems, changed one of their software vendors, and until they get it right, we're just not gonna install it."

Note that he offered no horizon for the program's eventual advent, which sounds to us like good news for peer-to-peer bike-sharing startup Spinlister, which launched back in April.

Citibank is taking the free lollipops to the next level.

Citibank opened The Bank of the Future in Union Square today, a flagship branch featuring technology from Singapore and Hong Kong that makes simple financial transactinos look  like something out of Minority Report.

Customers can browse banking products at one of six touchscreen "sales walls" or watch TV on one of the "media walls," Mashable reports.

And whenever a certain amount of people check in to the branch on Foursquare, a video panel shows which users are inside the branch.

"We want this branch to be more than just a bank," Brad Dinsmore, Citigroup's head of retail banking in North America, said in a speech at the opening ceremony. "We want this branch to be a place where customers view it as a hub, a center of the community, if you will. A place where they feel warm and welcome, that they can come in and experience our free Wi-Fi access."

Sounds cozy—we're adding Citibank to the list of places to get free Wi-Fi.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries