The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center warned banks to be on heightened alert after Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase experienced unexplained outages of public-facing websites on Wednesday. The warning cited "recent credible intelligence" as the justification for raising the threat level similar to that of the Department for Homeland Security scale from "elevated" to "high."

JPMorgan Chase spokesman Patrick Linehan said that the bank was "experiencing intermittent issues with Chase.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working to restore full connectivity."

Bank of America spokesman Mark Pipitone reported no continuing problems on Wednesday after seeing issues on Tuesday. "Our online banking services have been, and are, up and running. The vast majority of our customers have not experienced any issues."

Electronista spoke with an official at Verizon who confirmed some aspects of the report: "we're seeing attack-related traffic across portions of our network related to financial services." The official declined to provide specific information on the volume or source of the attacks.

An individual claiming to belong to the "cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam" posted a message on pastebin.com that said the group would attack Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange in the opening shots of a campaign against the financial assets of "American-Zionist Capitalists." It is unclear if the threat is the "credible source" referred to by the financial industry security group, or if this particular threat had anything to do with the internet connectivity issues at either of the two banks.