Bank of America, one of the victims of Operation Ababil (Screengrab)

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters published a new message on their Pastebin profile late Monday, warning of a new round of cyber attacks against U.S. financial institutions, beginning this week.

In their lengthy post, titled "Phase 2 Operation Ababil," the Qassam Cyber Fighters announced that they plan to attack websites owned by J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial Services and SunTrust Banks.

Previous cyber attacks for which the ideologically-motivated group claimed credit took some bank sites down for more than 24 hours and affected website functions for days afterwards. The Cyber Fighters say that in Phase 2, "the wideness and the number of attacks will increase explicitly; and offenders and subsequently their governmental supporters will not be able to imagine and forecast the widespread and greatness of these attacks."

U.S. officials have said they believe the attacks are state-sponsored by Iran, but the cyber attackers still insist they are not working for any government. Though they mention events since their previous attacks such as Israel's efforts against Hamas, the al-Qassam Cyber Fighters still say their main reason for renewed cyber attacks is the presence of Innocence of Muslims on the Internet. Google has refused to removed the anti-Islamic video from the Internet in nations where it is not against the law.

Fox Business notes one of the reasons security researchers and U.S. officials have said they believe the al-Qassam Cyber Fighters are more organized and well-funded than an ad-hoc group of cyber terrorists is because they use such a sophisticated botnet of compromised web servers. The Cyber Fighters' zombie army of bots sidesteps bandwidth limits and focuses more power against their targets than attacks from home computers.

Previous banks affected by al-Qassam's efforts included Wells Fargo, Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange.

Update: It looks like the Cyber Fighters didn't waste any time. As of 1:45 p.m. ET Tuesday, many Bank of America customers were reporting problems accessing the bank's website.

Stuxnet, the first shot across the bow. (Krebs On Security)

Cyber attackers who went after Chase and Bank of America with Directed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the banks' websites may have been working for Iran.

A report from the Washington Post cites several officials who have made this claim, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Post reports that in an interview with C-SPAN, Sen. Lieberman disputed the idea the attackers were independent hacktivists outraged by a controversial anti-Muslim film:

"I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the Web sites," said Lieberman in an interview taped for C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program. "I think this was done by Iran and the Quds Force, which has its own developing cyberattack capability." The Quds Force is a special unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of the military.

Lieberman said he believed the efforts were in response to "the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions."

The Post also reported that there have been similar attacks against American telecoms such as AT&T and Level 3.

What wasn't clear from Sen. Lieberman's remarks or the Post's report was whether the "Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam," who claimed credit for the attacks and dubbed them "Operation Ababil" were opportunistic trolls or misdirection by Iranian cyber forces.

If officials and cyber-security experts quoted by the Post are correct, it is likely Iran intended the bank attacks as a response to U.S. actions such as the infiltration of the Stuxnet worm, which disrupted Iranian nuclear operations in 2010. Stuxnet targeted uranium enrichment centrifuges and caused them to spin wildly out of control.

The most recent Pastebin post from the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam claimed the attack on Chase's web properties was step two. They seemed to imply there were several more steps to go.

Izz ad-Din al-Qassam (Wikimedia)

The Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam, a group of cyber-attackers who have targeted Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange, allegedly struck J.P. Morgan Chase today. Fox Business reported on the site outage at Chase.com and consulted with Flashpoint Partners about the problems. Flashpoint told Fox that Chase's problems were probably due to a "sustained denial of service attack."

The religiously-motivated hackers, who claim they are responding to the anti-Muslim video, Innocence of Muslims, have published a new Pastebin page claiming credit for the Chase attack:

In the name of Allah the companionate the merciful

My soul is devoted to you Dear Prophet of Allah

"Operation Ababil" started over BoA :

http://pastebin.com/mCHia4W5
http://pastebin.com/wMma9zyG

In the second step we attacked the largest bank of the united states, the "chase" bank. These series of attacks will continue untill the Erasing of that nasty movie from the Internet.

The site "www.chase.com" is down and also Online banking at "chaseonline.chase.com" is being decided to be Offline !

Down with modern infidels.

### Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam ###

"Operation Ababil" was also the name of a failed Pakistani military operation that occurred in April, 1984.

Pakistan planned the maneuver (sometimes spelled "Operation Ababeel") as an effort to capture a glacier in the long-disputed region of Kashmir. India learned of the plan and managed to seize the area two days before Pakistan pulled the trigger on the mission.

Are the Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam hinting that they might be based in Pakistan? Not necessarily--the name of the operation could be a red herring.

The group's moniker may mean more than whatever they call their efforts against financial institutions; Izz ad-din Al qassam, according to Wikipedia, was the name of a Syrian-born "Muslim preacher who was a leader in the fight against British, French, and Zionist organizations in the Levant in the 1920s and 1930s."

Innocence of Muslims has been blocked in Pakistan and several other heavily Muslim countries but Google has refused to completely remove the film from the web.