Common Information Security Threats

Common Information Security Threats

In this technological day and age security threats can be found around every corner. From emails sent to home computers to black hat hackers trying to break into a company's network. There is no easy way to look at this situation and there is no real easy way to stop these kinds of security threats. Even the Cyber Security branch of the FBI has to deal with a multitude of attacks each day. This paper will talk about different security threats that the FBI's Cyber Security Department has to deal with on the Financial Sector.

The attacks on the financial sector deals with security threats like account takeovers, third party payment processor breaches, securities and market trading exploitations, ATM skimming and point of sales schemes, mobile banking exploitation, insider access, supply chain infiltration and telecommunication network disruptions. This is a lot for anyone to deal with but these are the threats that come in on a day to day basis on the United States Governments financial sector. According to Snow (n.d.) ("Cyber criminals can significantly threaten the finances and reputations of United States businesses and financial institutions. Given the abundance of potential victims and profits, cyber criminals will likely continue to target these entities. The FBI is committed to addressing these threats through innovative and proactive means and making the Internet more secure for financial institutions and U.S. consumers alike").

Potential Risk and Related Vulnerabilities

With dealing with these different attacks on the USA's Financial Sector there is different potential risk to different information. With Account Takeovers, cyber criminals have proven their skills to take advantage of the Governments online financial and market systems that are associated with the internet. The cyber criminals are using things like the Automated Clearing House or ACH systems, credit or debit card payments, and market trades. With doing this the criminals are easily utilizing the users of the system, instead of the system. They gain access to this by compromising the users account authorization. According to Snow (n.d) on September 14, 2011 ("The FBI is currently investigating over 400 reported cases of corporate account takeovers in which cyber criminals have initiated unauthorized ACH and wire transfers from the bank accounts of U.S. businesses. These cases involve the attempted theft of over $255 million and have resulted in the actual loss of approximately $85 million").

Another attack that has hit the Financial Sector hard is known as Third Party Payment Processor Breaches. No random cyber criminal can do this type of attack. These criminal have to be intelligent to carry this attack out. The reason for this is because this type of attack on the Financial Sector has been targeting the computer networks of big payment processors. Which has caused "The loss of millions of dollars and the compromise of personally identifiable information (PII) of millions of individuals" (Snow n.d.).

ATM skimming and point of sales schemes can be found globally. The way a cyber criminal can do this is by putting a skimmer on