Vulnerability of Financial Infrastructure Exposed by Cyber Attacks
By Rob Scott
September 28, 2012
September 28, 2012
- U.S. banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC and Wells Fargo have been the target of cyber attacks this week from what is believed to be a group outside the country, says an unidentified U.S. official.
- The attacks have flooded the bank websites with traffic, making them unavailable at times and disrupting transactions. The group is reportedly using a method known as distributed denial-of-service and has taken control of commercial servers.
- “Such a sustained network attack ranks among the worst-case scenarios envisioned by the National Security Agency, according to the U.S. official, who asked not to be identified because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly,” reports Businessweek. “The extent of the damage may not be known for weeks or months, said the official, who has access to classified information.”
- “The nature of this attack is sophisticated enough or large enough that even the largest of the financial institutions would find it difficult to defend against,” suggests Rodney Joffe, senior VP at security firm Neustar Inc.
- “The notable thing is the volume and the scale of the traffic that’s been directed at these sites, and that’s very rare,” adds Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and CTO of security firm CrowdStrike Inc.
- Cybersecurity specialists who have been tracking the assaults say that by breaching some of the nation’s most advanced computer systems, the attacks have exposed the vulnerability of its infrastructure.
- “If the financial industry, which spends more on Internet security than any other industry and has its largest and most extensive defenses, can’t handle this, it’s not clear whether any critical-infrastructure industry can,” notes the article.
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