From Bank Systems and Technology Online Web Site:

Amidst the chaos immediately following Hurricane Katrina, it was reassuring to see at least one entity had its act together—the financial services sector. Even before the floodwaters began to recede, banks in the hurricane zone were in action, attempting to restore their operations.

Although there was no mass disruption of the large-value payments systems and core systems that occurred after 9/11, Katrina’s effects were no less significant from a retail banking perspective. Consumers’ ability to simply subsist depended on their being able to access their funds. This became a top priority for banks….

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FROM BANK INFO SECURITY:

Impact of Information Security Trends on Banks, Part 2 : Shift Towards Application Level Attacks:

Many attacks in the past decade have focused on vulnerabilities at the network and operating systems level. Nowadays, hackers seem to be more closely focusing on application level attacks. There are several reasons for this.

• Too many network protocol suits are being used by organizations
• Organizations tend to use too many different operating systems within standard network services
• Too many different applications are used within each PC
   

There are a lot of applications, so many, that it is much more difficult to keep track of vulnerabilities and patches at this level. This is also reflected within security controls, as there are many robust controls for networks and operating systems, and fewer for application level attacks. Additionally, most  controls concentrate on standard services and protocols (e.g. they can detect and block HTTP protocol anomalies, but are unable to protect against more specific application attacks that use those protocols).

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FROM BANK INFO SECURITY:

Internal attacks on computer systems are overtaking external attacks at the world’s largest financial institutions.

That’s a key finding from the 2005 Global Security Survey conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. In the annual survey, 35% respondents said that in the past 12 months, they’ve suffered attacks that originated inside the organization. That’s a massive increase over the previous year’s 14%.

By comparison, 26% said they were attacked by outside sources, up from 23% the prior year….

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TEST BEYOTCH!

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