Executives of major Wall Street banks and the institutions themselves may be targets of new terror plots tied to al-Qaida's Yemen branch, NBC New York reports.

Officials at Goldman Sachs, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and other institutions received briefings last month from the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, the report said. There don't seem to be specific threats, but officials have noted references to Wall Street in the al-Qaida affiliate's magazine, Inspire.

In a separate online posting, an al-Qaida blogger named Abu Suleiman Al-Nasser urged Muslims to rush "to targeting financial sites and the program sites of financial institutions, stock markets and money markets."

The banks may be enhancing mailroom security and scrutinizing packages more carefully as a result.

An FBI spokesman indicated the briefings were not based on any urgent information. Rather, "[t]his was in the course of a periodic update in the evolving threat stream," spokesman Jim Margolin said.

Published threats from al-Qaida and its affiliates should be taken seriously, said U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-New York. "Whenever a name is included ... it's always a cause for more concern because again the fear is that that's sending a specific signal to specific operatives in this country to take action," King said.