With huge stacks of cash comes huge responsibility. Financial institutions are being bombarded with cyberattacks.
The scoop
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand recently became the victim of a data breach due to zero-day flaws in a legacy file sharing solution provided by Accellion. The files exposed during the breach included personal email addresses, dates of birth, and credit information. The same set of flaws were exploited to target other organizations like the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Office of the Washington State Auditor, and more.
What does this imply?
This breach displays that irrespective of the preparedness of an organization against cyberattacks, threat actors will always try to reign supreme by exploiting the weak spots. Moreover, a data breach is just the tip of a series of privacy concern iceberg.
What else?
- The Hotarus Corp hacking group hacked Ecuador’s Ministry of Finance, along with the country’s largest bank Banco Pichincha. The group has claimed to have stolen internal data.
- Online banking and shopping fraud have increased by 63% in Pakistan due to the rise in online activities since the pandemic struck the world.
- An unknown attacker offered the database of Ukraine’s PrivatBank for sale on a hacking forum. It is the largest commercial bank in Ukraine and the database contains 40 million entries, although the bank has denied that the data belongs to it.
The bottom line
Not only banks but the entire financial sector is suffering from cyber threats. Last year, more than 100 financial services firms fell victim to cyberattacks, and the number of victims just keep piling up. Besides, COVID-19 has hit the sector pretty hard, with 70% of financial services companies facing successful attacks. Thus, the sector needs to be careful about its cybersecurity posture and take measures to enhance the security of money and data.
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