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Throughout 2012, an ongoing series of distributed denial of service attacks crippled a number of Americans biggest banks, including Bank of America, PNC, and HSBC — attacks that are believed to have attributed from Iran, possibly as retribution for the US-funded Flame and Stuxnet malware that was meant to attack Irans nuclear weapons program. According to the report, the Obama administration decided against hacking into Irans network to shut down the source of the attacks, an approach that was deemed too provocative. Instead, it took the rather unprecedented action of working with 120 nations to stop the attack at various network nodes around the globe. The plan involved a combination of outreach from both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to their counterparts to handle both the diplomatic and technical aspects of the US response.