Banks victim of zero-day bug breaches

Bloomberg has revealed that five sizable financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, have been hacked, citing anonymous sources for the report.

Joshua Campbell, a supervisory agent  with the FBI, released a statement that read:

“[The FBI is] working with the United States Secret Service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions.”

The group of cyber criminals – who are believed to be Russian as well as state-sponsored – could have taken advantage of a zero-day bug one or more of the banks’ websites, before making its way through multiple complex layers of security to acquire sensitive data, according to the report.

The attacks saw gigabytes of data stolen, which included information that could possibly lead to funds being drained from accounts. The report also revealed that there has, at present, been no indication of money being transferred between accounts, or any other forms of fraudulent activity.

The causes behind the attacks remain undetermined as yet. A threat specialist from TSC Advantage, Armond Caglar, spoke to SCMagazine.com and explained that the motivation may have been the acquisition of account and savings data.

Financial institutions are an obvious target of cyber criminals, but any businesses in any industry are susceptible to criminal activity if their systems hold sensitive data that can be considered in some way valuable. It only serves to highlight the importance of company bosses posting and filling cyber security jobs to help thwart any potential threats to that data.