World’s Biggest Bank Forced to Trade Via USB Stick After Hack
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1. It happened during the Treasury auction, and if the timing was intentional, a case could be made about it being a national security issue. The hackers disrupted the largest, and possibly most important, auction in the financial world.
2. The hackers may have unintentionally provoked an entity you definitely don’t want on your bad side: the People’s Liberation Army’s cyber arm.
3. I wonder if ICBC used a specialized courier service to send the USB stick, or if such a thing even exists. Or did they just use any old messenger service in Manhattan? If the latter, it’s funny to think that there was somebody biking across the city carrying billions of dollars worth of liquidity and settlement data and he/she would’ve been none the wiser.
No idea what that company might be, but I'd imagine they don't use bikes just for the "bus factor" risk of that person getting into an accident and the envelope lost.
Then you have the main security cordon, a quad / box. They would be on motorbikes, but it would be like guards, and since the traffic is already cleared by the forward section, it would just go at the fastest speed the cyclist courier can go.
The cyclist is in the middle of the quad/box.
Then at the back you have a rear section (also 3 NYPD off duty cops on motorbikes with firearms licenses and authorized to shoot with no consequence because they are union protected), which will block traffic from coming too close to the courier.
Three memory sticks
Two encryptions
One file
I imagine the banks have something like that or even better.
Sounds hackable.
A large player in the US Treasury auction goes off line during the auction and it turns out to be a big nothing burger.
It had no impact on the auction but ICBC is a decent sized player in the repo market so it could have a slight impact on the over night rate, but again, there are so many banks involved in the repo market that the impact was not noticeable.
So far the hack is attributed to Lockbit, who is supposedly associated with the Russians, which is the first time I've heard of the Russians directly trying to interfere with a US treasury auction.
The hack seems to have affected China more than the US so maybe you can squint and say this is Russia attacking China more than Russian attacking the US here?
Or maybe to your ISP?
Or VPN host if that’s involved?
pushed up sleeves and starts editing code on archive.org
If you’re on iOS, just open it in any browser other than Safari. Other browsers don’t get provided through iCloud Private Relay.
Anyway, for what it's worth it works fine on my iPhone using iOS Safari.
I'm not suggesting anyone should be complaining to you, though--I'm just explaining why some people encounter issues visiting archive.today links and providing them with a workaround (disable iCloud Private Relay).
So when you connect the drive for the first time, bitlocker reformats it and encrypts the partition, making it clean for business data and preventing you from bringing it to a non-bank computer.
It is not ideal, but ** batch processing must happen daily OR ELSE ** even if that means driving a flash drive or an emergency uhaul rental's worth of paper across the state at a moment's notice. Every bank has progressively subgrade procedure sets depending on how bad their emergency is to ensure that this work is done.
> In this report, we share the most valuable intelligence that we gathered on Asian APT groups. Over the course of our work, we noticed that these groups attacked the greatest number of countries and industries. Most importantly, our analysis of hundreds of attacks revealed a similar pattern among various groups. They achieve specific objectives at various stages of the Cyber Kill Chain using a common but limited number of techniques encountered by security professionals all over the world. Unfortunately, security teams often have difficulty detecting these attacks in their own infrastructure.
Is that new?