Bank of America’s (BAC: 9.23, -0.07, -0.75%) website was experiencing sporadic outages on Tuesday related to a cyber attack that may be tied to an Islamic terrorist group, according to a source close to the matter.
The Charlotte, N.C.-based bank’s namesake site, bankofamerica.com, was not loading as of 4:15 p.m. ET and has been down for hours.
A source confirms to FOX Business that Bank of America’s website was in fact hit by a cyber attack. It was a “technical attack” that was focused on BofA’s domain name service (DNS) infrastructure.
A BofA spokesman said "some customers may experience occasional slowness" but the bank is "working to ensure full availability." BofA wouldn't comment on the attacks specifically, but the spokesman said, "I can tell you we continuously take proactive measures to secure our systems."
A group called “Izz ad-din Al qassam Brigades” has claimed responsibility on PasteBin, which is a forum commonly used by these types of groups, including Anonymous, to issue threats or to brag about cyber attacks. In addition to the BofA attack, Izz ad-din Al qassam also said it is targeting the website of the New York Stock Exchange.
The source believes the outage was related to the threats issued on PasteBin against Bank of America and said that while it could be “just a big coincidence” it's “not likely.”
"It appears that the Radical Islamists have found the Group Anonymous playbook," the source said.

Microsoft (MSFT: 31.18, -0.04, -0.11%) warned of a newly-discovered bug in its Internet Explorer 9 browser late Monday that could make computers vulnerable to hacking attempts and viruses.
The flaw impacts hundreds of millions of Internet Explorer users and as many PCs but does not impact Internet Explorer 10, Microsoft said.
“We have received reports of only a small number of targeted attacks and are working to develop a security update to address this issue,” Microsoft’s director of the Trustworthy Computing Group, Yunsun Wee, said on the company’s official corporate security response blog.
The maker of Windows software advised customers late Monday to install free security software as a precaution as it tries to fix the bug and develop a new, uncompromised version of Internet Explorer.
“We are monitoring the threat landscape very closely and if the situation changes, we will post updates here on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog and on Twitter at @MSFTSecResponse,” Wee said.
Installing the enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit may protect PCs from malicious websites that give hackers the ability to crack into and take over the computer system. Microsoft said the software should not affect the usability of websites

Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2012/09/18/microsoft-warns-new-internet-explorer-bug-that-could-hurt-pcs/#ixzz26rLMclB4