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CYBERCRIME AND FINTECHS Tempting targets Mark Smith asks: how vulnerable is FinTech to cyber criminals?
world as that of cybercrime. From British supermarket giant Tesco to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, organisations of every type and scale have fallen victim to a new era of criminality where walls and vaults no longer offer any protection.
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The US Director of National Intelligence, James R Clapper, has ranked cybercrime above terrorism and espionage as the number one threat to the United States, while figures released by Get Safe Online revealed over £1 billion was lost by UK business to online crime in the last year, a 22% increase on the previous year.
The financial services sector has proven a particularly tempting target, with high profile attacks including the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank, the cyber heist at Vietnam’s Tien Phong Bank, and the infamous Carbanak campaign which stole more than $500 million from various financial institutions.
Even technology which had been thought to be ‘unhackable’ has shown itself to be vulnerable. In June The DAO, which was based on Ethereum (a decentralised blockchain inspired by Bitcoin) had more than $60 million worth of Ether digital currency stolen through a code exploit. And in August, nearly $72 million in Bitcoin was taken from the exchange platform Bitfinex in Hong Kong.
Where FinTech is concerned, experts say ownership of valuable assets coupled – in some instances – with a desire to prioritise growth over security infrastructure is creating a perfect storm of opportunity for criminals.
“The cyber security threat is increasing unfortunately
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ew threats loom as large over the modern
everyday. This is regrettable, but it has become a reality,” says Mihai Ivascu, cyber security advisor at non-profit networking group the Global FinTech Association and founder of Moneymailme. “The question is no longer if your company will be hacked, it’s a matter of when, and to what degree.”
On 19th October, London-based online accounting firm QuickFile was subjected to what co-founder Glenn Drake called ‘a significant and sustained’ distributed denial of service [DDoS] attack. Such attacks typically involve the use of a network of PCs or smart devices infected with malware to overload a site by flooding it with requests. In this instance, a Russian hacker group had targeted the site and were demanding a ransom of Bitcoin.
Drake comments: “Our team immediately started working on moving QuickFile to a DDoS mitigation scheme called CloudFlare, this process involves an update to our IP address and a subsequent delay, during which the new address propagates around the internet. Our customers were regaining access at different times depending on their internet service provider.”
The firm refused to pay the ransom but suffered losses which he believes to be in the ‘tens of thousands’. “We felt that the most prudent step would be to work on a long-term mitigation plan rather than succumb to paying ransoms, which surely would have resulted in repeat attacks further down the line. As a result of this incident we have now put in place very strong controls for mitigating these types of attacks of this nature.”
In another incident, hackers targeted a new portal prototype being tested by an unnamed major US lender
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