Terrorists may target financial sites

The U.S. government has warned American of an al-Qaida call for a cyberattack against online stock trading and banking Web sites, the Reuters news agency reported.

The Islamic militant group wants to "penetrate and destroy the databases of the U.S. financial sites," Reuters said, citing an unnamed source familiar with the warning. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed an alert was sent out but that there's no reason to believe the threat is credible.

The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) issued a "situational awareness report to industry stakeholders," Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke told Reuters. The threat calls for attacks to begin Friday and run through December in retaliation for the United States keeping terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

"Denial of service is what it called for," said a Homeland Security official who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, told Reuters the report was "nothing to panic over, but it will be looked at very carefully."

Robert Albertson, chief investment strategist at Sandler O'Neill & Partners in New York, told the news agency that it's unlikely al Qaeda members could do serious harm to financial Web sites.

"I'm not saying there aren't precautions to be taken, but I just can't fathom how there would be serious havoc," he said.

Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the RAND Corp., told Reuters that such threats were not unusual.

"There is a regular stream of Jihadist exhortations to attack various targets," he said. "Financial organizations stay at a fairly high level of readiness anyway because of regular assaults."

A government source said regulators were being briefed on the warning.