“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Check your American Express account last week? American Express customers trying to access their accounts on Thursday were met with blank screens or text in an ancient type face. Confirmed by the Company, their web site had come under a malicious attack.
The assault, which took American Express offline for two hours, was the latest in an intensifying campaign of unusually powerful attacks on American financial institutions. Dozens of financial sites have been taken off line since last September, costing millions of dollars. JPMorgan Chase was taken offline by a similar attack earlier this month, and Bank of America, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and PNC Bank were sequentially attacked last fall.
The apparent intent, as identified by company officials and experts, is not to slow down users, but to disable financial transactions and operations completely.
Corporate leaders have long feared online attacks aimed at financial fraud or economic espionage, but now a new threat is becoming apparent: attackers, possibly with state backing, who seem bent on destruction.
“The attackers are utilizing a more sophisticated approach, rather than their prior use of brute force.” said Dave Hudock, CEO of Veteran Business Solutions. “We are seeing much more focused and targeted attacks that have changed from espionage to destruction.”
He said, “and an increased demand for our Digital Forensic capabilities as we seek to correlate, interpret, and predict adversarial actions and their impact on future planned operations.”
2012 was the year when commercial and government agencies stepped up efforts to harden their systems despite tighter budgets. W. Hord Tipton, former CIO at the Interior Department said. “They’re recognizing that even though money is hard to come by, cybersecurity is certainly not an area where you can afford to fiscally constrain.”
“2013 is a year of the realization that this is a serious, complex, and potentially dangerous issue that cannot be ignored.” said Dave Hudock.
