With the ever declining economy, cyber breaches at financial service firms are increasing. These cyber attacks are not coming from outside sources, but from employees within the banks themselves.

CERT Chief Scientist, Gregory Shannon, told the House Financial Services Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit hearings — « The continued stress of the current economy on the workplace is impacting and exacerbating the potential for insider threat. » Shannon went on to say « One former system administrator wiped out billions of files on a financial institution’s servers all over the world at 9 a.m. one morning; and recently an individual copied source code containing proprietary trading algorithms to servers outside the U.S.after submitting his letter of resignation ». Almost half of all insider attacks were aided by outside accomplices; employees are stealing intellectual property and committing online sabotage. Damages inflicted on financial firms have risen to approximately $800,000 per organization.
The CERT Program is a federally funded research center, located at Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute – CERT is working with the U.S. Secret Service and the Treasury Department.  With sponsorship and support from Homeland Security, they are creating a threat model aimed at defending financial institutions from ongoing attacks.

The FBI is investigating more than 400 reported cases of corporate account takeovers, in which hackers have attempted unauthorized transfers from these business accounts.  Gordon Snow, FBI cyber division, stated the ongoing cases have dealt a collective blow of approximately $85 million to victimized companies.
There is a rising concern by law officials that the general public is unaware of these cybercrimes. This concern includes small businesses who do not have the resources of the major corporations, regarding security.
Last year alone, the Secret Service arrested 1,200 suspected cyber criminals, allegedly responsible for more than $500 million in fraud.  In order to arrest these criminals, the agency combed through 867 terabytes of data;  this is equivalent to almost four times the amount of data in the Library of Congress’ archives. The Secret Service has recently opened an office in Beijing, adding to the 23 overseas outposts already established for foreign investigations.  While it is widely believed that China is sponsoring cyber espionage in America, identity theft world wide has become an economic drain on both countries. Coordinating efforts by Federal officials and China to tackle online fraud could possibly help bridge other divides between both countries.

Pilfered or stolen codes are costing businesses millions of dollars: It is allowing competitors to make huge profits off leaked business strategies.  Closely held upcoming financial decisions are wide open, giving rivals a heads-up.

Organizations are working furiously to build walls around their network infrastructure in order to keep these criminals out.  The downside is, identifying and defending against cyber criminals that are already on the inside.

Related posts: