According to reports this week, the theft of more than $15 million from UniCredit in China came to light late last year, when cybersecurity loopholes were exploited to access clients’ money. “UniCredit regrets this incident and apologizes to those affected,” said a spokesperson. “The safety and security of our clients’ assets is our primary concern and all efforts have been made to ensure that a similar malicious incident cannot reoccur.”
A U.K. government report published last week reported that “32% of businesses identified a cybersecurity attack in the last 12 months,” and almost half of those attacked were attacked monthly. A director at the country’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that “the cybersecurity landscape remains complex and continues to evolve, and organizations need to continue to be vigilant.”
Under the hood or inside the tent
When we think of cybersecurity, we think of hackers hidden in online shadows, we think of the dark web, we think of malware, phishing attacks, social media fraud. We also think of nation-state bad actors. In January, the Director of National Intelligence told U.S. senators that Russia and China pose the biggest cyber threat to the United States. Last month, the U.K. acknowledged “a cyber incident affecting [major] organizations in late 2018, with “Iran being blamed for a wave of cyber attacks that targeted key parts of the U.K.’s national infrastructure in a major assault just before Christmas.”
No doubt organizations up and down the country immediately locked their doors and windows and updated their firewalls and wifi passwords. Unfortunately, even as the focus remains on faceless, external threats, the issue is actually much closer to home. As many as one in five cyber attacks and data breaches come directly from insiders, from employees, from so-called privilege misuse, and when the extended enterprise is taken into account, the numbers are far higher than that.
The UniCredit theft was perpetrated by an employee of the bank, who allegedly used a supervisor password to fabricate transactions, and it followed similar cyber embezzlements at China’s state-owned Postal Savings Bank of China and at “a rural bank in the northern Jilin province.”
