As cyberattacks detonate, banks gird for battle

Digital attacks on industry are growing more sophisticated

By Christina Rexrode and Marcy Gordon
Associated Press

It’s a war game, Wall Street style.

Banks large and small are girding for an elaborate drill this week that will test how they would fare if hackers unleashed a powerful and coordinated attack against them.

The exercise is being called “Quantum Dawn 2,” and if the name sounds like a video game, it’s also meant to convey the seriousness of the threat.

Cyberattacks on the banking industry are growing more frequent and sophisticated and the list of assailants is ever-changing: crime bosses who want money, “hacktivists” who want to make political statements, foreign governments that want to spy on U.S. companies. A successful, widespread attack on the industry would shake confidence in the banking system, and the possibility has banks and regulators on edge.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of the country’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, acknowledged that attacks are becoming more complex and dangerous, no longer carried out by “fairly simplistic” hackers commandeering people’s personal computers.

“Now you’re talking about state-sanctioned folks, hundreds of programmers,” he said in a call with reporters this spring, “taking over not just PCs but servers and mainframes.”

JPMorgan and its peers like Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have signed up for Thursday’s drill, which is being organized by Wall Street’s biggest trade group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA.

About 50 banks and organizations will participate, including  agencies like the Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI.
During the drill, bank employees will be stationed at their normal offices, and will be blasted throughout the day with bits of information that could indicate an encroaching hacker attack. They’ll monitor a simulated stock exchange for irregular trading and will be pressed to figure out what’s going on and how to react while sharing information with regulators and each other.

As the name suggests, this isn’t the first Quantum Dawn. The original drill was in November 2011, and it attracted scant attention and  half as many participants.

THE BARRAGE: Software giant Symantec calculates that cyberattacks against U.S. businesses jumped 42 percent last year. Banks, though, are reluctant to give more details about how they’re affected, financially or otherwise, for fear of becoming a target, and attacks often go undetected and unreported.

HIGH ALERT: Whatever the number, banks and the government are on high alert. President Barack Obama warned about international hacking against the banking industry in February’s State of the Union address. He later met with JPMorgan CEO Dimon, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and other business leaders to discuss the threat.

Big banks have started listing cyberattacks as a potential risk factor in filings for regulators.

IMPOSSIBLE VICTORY? Banks realize the threat isn’t going away. If anything, the possibility of an online attack will grow as customers do more transactions online and banks outsource operations to other companies whose systems might not be as secure.

Says Greg Garcia, a former DHS official who now runs the consulting firm Garcia Cyber Partners: “If someone asks, ‘When are you going to stop cybercrime?’ Well, when are you going to stop crime?”