Bank of America Web Site down, coincidence or hacked?

Nobody seems to know why the Bank of America Web Site has been down. Was it due to hackers irate at the new $5 debit card fee or is the timing of the outage merely coincidence?
From a security point of view it does not actually matter. If the site it down, it is down. For a major commerce site to suffer an unscheduled outage of this type is a major embarrassment no matter what the cause. That your Web sites are down because you did not plan enough capacity or redundancy does not make it OK.

As a security specialist, I have worked in the payments sector from time to time. The effort by the Fed to reduce the fees charged by banks to merchants was completely justified in my view. The charges that are made through the debit card network should carry absolutely no credit risk for the bank and the fraud risk is entirely the fault of the banks for their bad choice of security technology. Neither risk is sufficient to justify even the 22 cent per transaction fee that will be allowed after the Fed mandated cut. The 44 cents charged is utterly ludicrous.

The Chip and Pin system deployed in Europe and many other parts of the world has practically eliminated card present fraud at a cost of about $1 per card issued plus some infrastructure. There are technical flaws in the particular scheme deployed that I would prefer to see fixed, but it has proved more than sufficient to dramatically reduce fraud.

My email inbox is currently stuffed with mendacious emails on this topic from K-Street lobbyists and their astroturf fronts. Like many a campaign hatched on K-Street it seems to be more about furthering the interests of the lobbyists than their clients. The Republican shills running this campaign will win kudos in their party hierarchy and be rewarded with invitations to prestigious functions, but if they had an ounce of honesty they would have told their client that the effort is futile and will only damage them.

The change in the interchange fee only applies to banks with over $10B in assets. Thus it is unlikely that the smaller banks will be charging fees and the probability that BofA will actually follow through and charge the fee is practically nil.