SecureWorks Reports Number of Hackers Attacking Banks Up 81 Percent

  • Aug 06, 2007

SecureWorks, the largest managed information security services provider safeguarding 1,800 clients and more financial institutions than any other vendor, announced today that the number of hackers attempting to attack its banking clients is up 81% since last year and hackers attempting to attack its credit union clients is up 62% since last year. SecureWorks blocked 167 million hacker attacks in the last 30 days.

"In June 2006 to December of 2006, we were blocking attacks from approximately 808 hackers per bank per month," said Allen Wilson, VP of Research for SecureWorks. "Since the beginning of 2007 up until June, the average number of hackers launching attacks at each of our banks is 1,462. For our credit unions, we were blocking attacks from 1,110 hackers per credit union per month. That number has risen to 1,799 hackers per credit union per month."

"We've seen the number of hackers increase year over year, as more and more criminals realize the money that can be made and the minimal risk they face in perpetrating these crimes," said Allen Wilson, VP of Research. "Most of the hackers we see stealing financial data are located in Russia and Eastern Europe, however, we are witnessing a growing number coming out of China. These countries have large numbers of talented young people who are extremely computer literate. Challenging socioeconomic conditions, combined with a lack of computer crime legislation, makes the allure of committing low- risk, fraud- related crimes against victims on the other side of the world an appealing choice."

"The amount of stolen financial data we have found since the first of the year has been daunting," said Don Jackson, security researcher for SecureWorks and discoverer of the Gozi and Prg Trojans. See http://secureworks.com/research/threats/gozitrojan and http://secureworks.com/research/threats/prgtrojan/

"With the Gozi, Prg and BBB trojans alone, we found millions of dollars of data sitting in their stolen repositories," said Jackson. "These data caches contained thousands of bank account and credit card numbers, social security numbers, online payment accounts and user names and passwords, and we are finding new caches of stolen data everyday, evidence that more and more criminals are getting into the game."

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