According to a brand new report, Russia has now declared cyberwar on the United States, using preliminary, but increasing steps in a campaign that is designed to try and cripple the country’s banking systems and possibly other industries as well.
Major U.S. banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs are constantly under cyberattacks from criminals, most of which seem to come from Russia, Iran, and China. However, those attacks are beginning to grow in intensity after sanctions were placed on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, according to Charles Gasparino, a business reporter for the The New York Post.
via Newsmax:
The bank executives would not comment on the record out of fear that comments would embolden both cybercriminals and Russian government proxies, and referred calls to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a cybersecurity consortium for the banking industry.
“We are in close communication with our member firms and relevant authorities around the world to monitor cyber activity against the financial sector,” a group spokesperson went on to tell The Post in a recent statement. “At this time, the sector is not seeing any significant threats attributable to any geographic origin. We continue to actively assess the situation through enhanced monitoring and cross-border threat intelligence sharing across the financial services sector.”
The Biden administration has been working with the banks for some time to prepare for cyberattacks, and the banks have spent billions of dollars to protect their systems, but the paper’s sources say the latest wave is a “subtle but intensified assault” on the banks’ technology infrastructure.
One executive who works for a big bank stated that the consensus in the industry right now is that Russia is the party behind the recent wave of attacks, going on to add that so far, there have been no real breaches.
Press officials who work for JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, have not, as of this writing, given a comment on the report.
The financial sector is likely to be better protected than other industries against cyberattacks because it spends billions on the issue, but “other industries are definitely at risk of attack,” Herb Lin, a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, commented to The Post.
“I think the water utility companies could be a weak spot as they’re not known for their cybersecurity,” he said.
Moscow has thus far denied having any ties to the criminals who were behind the major attacks on the Colonial Pipeline and the meat producer JBS, however federal intelligence officials have stated that the hackers have received at least some support from Russian President Vladimir Putin.