The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating reports that JPMorgan and at least four other US banks have been targeted by hackers in an attempt to obtain sensitive customer data.
The cyberattacks have been linked to Russian hackers, Bloomberg reported, who quoted sources claiming that hackers have been able to extract “gigabytes of sensitive data”.
The attacks may be connected to recent hacking attempts against European banks, it is understood. Investigators are said to be exploring links to both the Russian government and to Russian criminal networks, although Eastern European criminals are also a potential source.
Cybersecurity experts and US government officials have not yet confirmed this, nor have they been able to confirm these attacks are linked to the recent US imposed sanctions on Russia.
In a statement, the FBI is said to be currently working with the Secret Service to determine the source of the attack.
“We are working with the United States secret service to determine the scope of recently reported cyber attacks against several American financial institutions,” said FBI supervisory special agent Joshua Campbell.
JPMorgan Chase declined to comment about the attacks. “Companies of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day. We have multiple, layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels,” said a statement.
Cybersecurity experts say that these sorts of crimes are usually linked to obtaining intellectual property, rather than causing damage to financial institutions.
“There’s always been an assumption because of the global nature of financial systems, that attacking a financial system will cause mutual disruption and financial loss,” said Rory Innes, head of cybersecurity at Salamanca Group.
“Russia, for example, has money in the US financial system as do all big nations, and it will affect every nation involved. If it is state sponsored espionage, which is what the FBI have proposed, it’s likely that it is about intellectual property theft to increase home competitive advantage or to make a political statement in retaliation for Western sanctions.”
Costin G Raiu, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said that cybercriminals are constantly developing more sophisticated ways to target instiutions st scale.
“JP Morgan is a gold mine for this sort of information. Previously cyber criminals have been going after individual people’s money, so in a sense we’re seeing an evolution of cyber attacks.
“Instead of going after a few dollars these cyber criminals are using their resources to go straight to the banks.”
Russian cybercriminals stole the credit card details of up to 110 million shoppers from the the US department store chain Target in December 2013, and in the same month hacking in to a BBC file transfer server and trying to sell access to other hackers.
In August 2014, Wisconsin-based Hold Security claimed that Russian cyber gang CyberVor stole data from more than 420,000 websites to amass 4.5bn records, including 500,000 email addresses and 1.2bn username and password combinations.
Hold Security also uncovered the Adobe Systems attack in October 2013 in which 2.9 million customer IDs and passwords were stolen, including customer names and encrypted debit or credit card numbers along with their expiration dates.
