JPMorgan and 4 Other Banks Were Hacked

The FBI is currently investigating reports that a number of major American banks have been targeted by hackers who tried to steal sensitive customer data. News agencies blamed Russians, who allegedly managed to extract gigabytes of sensitive information.

Some believe that those attacks follow the recent hacking attempts against European banks, and investigators were quick to “find links” to both the Russian government and to Russian criminal networks. In reality, it could be anyone, and Eastern European criminals are recognized as another potential source.

However, neither cyber security experts nor American government officials have yet confirmed that the attacks were linked to the recent sanctions against Russia. The latter didn’t even feel them, by the way. The FBI only admitted it was currently cooperating with the Secret Service to find out the source of the attack.

As for JPMorgan Chase, the bank also declined to comment about the attacks, saying that companies of its size experience cyber attacks almost every day. The bank also emphasized it has multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats.

According to cyber security experts, those kinds of crimes normally aim for obtaining intellectual property, rather than causing damage to companies. Due to the global nature of financial systems, it is believed that attacking a financial system will cause mutual disruption and financial loss. For instance, Russia has money in the US financial system like any other big nation, and it will affect any nation. In case of a state sponsored attack, it would be about intellectual property theft aimed at increasing home competitive advantage or making a political statement.

According to the experts from Kaspersky Lab, the hackers are constantly developing more ways to target companies at scale, and large American banks look like a gold mine for this sort of information. Earlier, the hackers have been going after individual people’s money, but now their attacks have evolved – instead of stealing a few dollars from individuals, the hackers go straight to the banks.

In the meantime, it is known that Russian hackers were wise enough to steal the credit card details of up to 110 million shoppers from the American department store chain Target a few months ago and hack in to a BBC file transfer server. Last month, Wisconsin-based Hold Security claimed that the Russian hacking collective named CyberVor obtained data from over 420,000 websites to amass 4.5bn records. The leaked data contained 500,000 email addresses and twice more the username and password combinations.

The same company also uncovered the Adobe Systems attack a year ago, where almost 3 million customer IDs and passwords were also stolen by the intruders. At the time, the leaked data included customer names and encrypted debit/credit card numbers with expiration dates.