Cybercrime experts had recently submitted their report from the collective evidence gathered concerning the world financial sector status. In their concluded investigation, there is a noticeable increase in an attack targeting banks and other financial institutions around the globe. Statistics show that the rise mostly due to ransomware, identity theft, credit card fraud, and internet and email phishing scams. With the current pandemic crisis, the crisis allows malicious actors to broaden their evil deeds further as different security firms have recorded many reports of an attack. Luring victims with the themed Covid-19 increasing the spike to the statistics.
Part of the analysis concluded that leading banks around the world have at least one database that is prone to possible data leakage, has remote execution vulnerabilities for online banking, reinvestment deposits (RDP) information exposure to the internet. The security industry significantly identifies these loopholes as the main avenues that hackers use to get their way to these institutions.
A sample of the attack
A cited sample that hit big on the report is the use of ransomware. With its highly sophisticated codes and stealthily execution, it is explicitly tagged designed for financial sector infiltration. As part of their TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), operators that have successfully infiltrated financial institutions will then post an encrypted copy of the obtained sensitive information on the internet and will ask blood money from its victim. Most organizations are said to heed on the perpetrator’s demand rather than losing the business itself because of the possible outcome once the hackers have exposed the full information.
Utilizing the attack and consequence in the Financial sector
Aside from ransomware, another cause that was highlighted by the report is the attack by using malware or trojan applications. With people being drawn by technology to ease of transaction through online or mobile banking, this paved the way for the hackers to victimized clients of these money firms. With their genius tactics of luring the victim to install fake applications, open attachment, or redirecting customers to the hackers’ controlled domain, they were able to spread infections to these internet-connected devices. Thus, hackers able to swim to the vast information they can extract to the compromised machine and able to perform malicious acts on it at their will. Such an uneventful event will leave the victim possible reputation damage, and worst money loss.
This analysis report aimed to open everyone’s minds about how these money firms utilized the current technology to improve and ease their daily transaction. It also aimed to spread awareness that malicious actors are also keeping up on these latest trends. Everyone is expected to be more cautious when it comes to our well-earned money. Also, our financial institutions must be more proactive in identifying vulnerabilities within their infrastructure and investing in much tighter system security.
