Hacking Attacks on Banks & Credit Unions Rise Immensely

Hackers' attacks on various banks all over the world has gone up by 81% since 2006, according to SecureWorks, an Internet security company. Also, such attacks targeting the credit union organizations rose by 62% since the same year, researchers reported. SecureWorks released these figures on August 2, 2007 at the Black Hat Conference.

During June-December 2006, the company was blocking hackers' attacks on banks at the rate of over 800 hackers for each bank each month. From the start of 2007 till June, the attacks on each of SecureWorks' banking clients were an average of 1,460. For the customers of its credit union, SecureWorks was blocking hacking attacks at the rate of over 1,100 hackers/ credit union/month. Now that rate has increased to over 1,800 hackers/credit union each month, reported Allen Wilson, Vice President of Research for SecureWorks. SecureWorks published this on August 3, 2007.

This incredible increase in attacks does not necessarily require hackers to be technically astute to design operations for committing theft of user information. There are malware and toolkits for sale that helps to set up a hacking operation to steal people's identification details to sell it to other cyber criminals or capture banking information to illegally withdraw money from people's accounts.

SecureWorks found a hefty amount of illegally captured financial data since January 2007. The company identified data worth millions of dollars accounting to Prg, BBB and Goz trojans alone. The data found in their pilfered repositories contained huge number of credit card and bank account numbers, accounts of online payment, Social Security numbers, and usernames and passwords. The company's discovery of such new data caches every single day indicates the presence of increasing criminals into the disrepute game, said Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks. Darkreading reported this on August 2, 2007.

Hackers who steal financial information are largely located in Eastern Europe and Russia and to a great extent, in China as well. These countries hold a lot of talented youth with high computer knowledge.

As socio-economic conditions become unfavorable and legislation on computer crime gets low, they aid in committing minimal risk, committing crimes against innocent victims.

Related article: Hacking Attacks Are Increasing to Haunt Banks

» SPAMfighter News - 8/14/2007