Rob a bank – freeze the U.S. financial market
I’m jumping into the ThreatMetrix blog today; I’m Tom Grubb — I run marketing at ThreatMetrix. This morning while riding CalTrain up to FinovateStartup09 from San Jose, I read a New York Times article that reports Obama is expected to propose a “far larger defense effort” to defend against cyberattacks and pursue offensive capabilities. The banking and financial industry has its hands full staying one step ahead of fraudsters intent on stealing money — but it turns out a bigger threat may be cyberattacks from foreign governments launched with intent to threaten the U.S. money supply.
Could a cyber bank heist on one of the large banks derail our economy? Apparently it’s one of the cyberwarfare scenarios that the Obama administration is preparing for. Fraudsters and political enemies share a common interest: creating armies of bots that can silently and stealthily wreak havoc on the internet. The NYT reported further that “what alarmed the panel was not the capabilities of individual hackers but of nations — China and Russia among them — that experts believe are putting huge resources into the development of cyberweapons. A research company called Team Cymru recently examined “scans” that came across the Internet seeking ways to get inside industrial control systems, and discovered more than 90 percent of them came from computers in China.” I can easily imagine more than a few banks we’re scanned too — and found to be infiltrated from offshore.
Unlike traditional war, in cyberwar as the NYT points out “it is hard to know where to strike back, or even who the attacker might be.” The same technologies that prevent fraud – including device intelligence could go a long way in zeroing in on the “who” and “where” questions when it comes to large scale cyberwarfare — and fraudsters committing good old fashioned online bank heists from the comfort of their living rooms.
- Tom
