Reported by Dean Wilson on Thursday, February 7 2013 2:16 am
The US Federal Reserve had admitted that hackers stole personal information from its servers during a hack that could affect as many as 4,000 bank executives.
The US Federal Reserve had admitted that hackers stole personal information from its servers during a hack that could affect as many as 4,000 bank executives.
The Federal Reserve said that passwords were not compromised, but a contact database, designed for use in natural disasters, had been breached, due to a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product. It said the security hole is now fixed and does not affect its critical operations.
The admission follows the publication of details of 4,000 US bank executives by loose-knit hacktivist group Anonymous. It is not clear if the two are connected, but if they are then the leaked list was certainly substantial.
The hack is considered one of the more worrisome ones in recent years, owing largely to the fact that banks and other financial institutions are required by law to disclose sensitive financial information to the Federal Reserve. If any of that information was exposed it could prove disastrous, and trust in the Federal Reserve is likely to be considerably weakened.
This is not the first time the Federal Reserve has been hacked. In 2010 Malaysian hacker Lin Mun Poo broke into the systems and took sensitive information that he allegedly then planned to exploit to steal money.
This latest attack puts the Feds back under the spotlight, and many will be questioning just how safe computer networks are if the servers of agencies like this can be breached.
Source: BBC
Image Credit: Federal Reserve
Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/us-federal-reserve-admits-hackers-stole-data/18901.html#ixzz2KeOt6pG0
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