As we make great strides in the 21th century, we have to face and cope with cybercrimes, that’s why we have come up with Insider Monkey’s list of the 3 biggest cybercrimes in finance services sector. There are no days when we don’t use our computers, laptops or other gadgets, therefore they are vulnerable targets of cyber attackers. These attacks can be identity thieving, phising or spamming. Although we try to defend our tools by using ransomware, or spyware, cyber criminals often forego our efforts and they manage to intrude into our tools and steal or ruin our important datas. If we think of our bank accounts our fear is deeper, as we have a lot to lose. This is more acutely true for financial sector, which is not safe from the cyber criminals. Now let’s see what Insider Monkey have investigated for us about the 3 biggest cybercrimes in finance services sector.
When the FASTCash ATM attack was, another serious cybercrime happened, in which a hacking group called Lazarus developed a ransomware cryptoworm so-called “WannaCry”. It was the malware thaat infected the devices, and as soon as the virus activated itself, it totally encrypted all the files on the computers, and the devices were impossible to use. It isn’t difficult to find out what happened after that: Lazarus demanded a ransom payment in the bitcoin cryptocurrency. After getting the payment, they decrypted the files. Their main targets were banks in Russia, railroads, cell phone operators, government computers.
2. The AppleJeus Attack
Lazarus was in the limelight in 2018, too, as it attacked many financia companies and banks as part of their global cyber-terrorism scheme. In this case their targets were many of cryptocurrency traders, and the name of this attack was: “Operation: AppleJeus.”
In this attack a code intruded into a cryptocurrency application for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Actually, the users didn’t notice anything, since every feature appeared to work as before. After installing the app, the virus activated itself and ran a program called Updater.exe. Then, this file gathered all the datas of the owner from the device before sending them to the main server.
1. The Zero-Day Exploit
Unfortunately Lazarus isn’t the only major hacking group working across the globe, but there is another one, too, called Buhtrap, which is infamous for attacking financial institutions and businesses in Russia. They used a Zero-Day exploit to attack and intrude into the Microsoft Windows operating system.
What’s sure, everybody needs to be extremely careful when using transaction lines. There are so many cyber criminals, and so many bad intentions, that you can never know who oberserves you in order to be able to steal your values. This was our compliation of the 3 biggest cybercrimes in finance services sector.
