Cyber Theft: A Modern Approach to Bank Robbery - TechGyant

Cyber Theft: A Modern Approach to Bank Robbery

Cyber-Theft-A-Modern-Approach-to-Bank-Robbery

These days, everything runs and works with the internet except for my coffee mug; we might have an automated mug later on, but this isn’t about coffee mugs and whether they would be able to make coffee in the near future but about how a $1 billion theft could be carried out successfully without the use of a weapon, or any force; Cyber Theft: A Modern Approach to Bank Robbery.

Computers and the internet were created to enable humans to live easily, not to worry about driving 10 miles to have a ten-minute conversation with someone. Still, through these easy lives, a harder life was created. Finding the internet as a comfort place could also mean exposing yourself to potential harm and danger.  Almost every industry is affected positively and negatively by using the Internet.

In September 1982, the United Kingdom launched the Nottingham Building Society Homelink Services, which allowed individuals to transfer money between accounts, pay bills, arrange loans, and perform other financial activities, leading to the emergence of online banking worldwide. This creative invention also birthed online theft, and since the emergence of online banking, there have been numerous attacks on financial institutions, resulting in loss of capital and many other damages.

What is Cyber Theft

Cyber Theft, also known as cybercrime, is illegal stealing or exploiting digital assets, data, or information through unauthorized access to computer systems or networks. This act could happen to any company in any industry, hospital, bank, or university if you have any information or assets about your company on a computer, which is very hard to do without these days. 

With an 18.9% share of cyber-attacks/theft, the finance and insurance industry is one of the most targeted organizations for a cyber attack coming after the manufacturing industry, according to a report by Statista in 2023. Cyber attacks on banks are raging and are carried out with mass negative impacts, with millions of dollars being lost to the attackers, sometimes leaving the banks to file for bankruptcy, depending on the scale of the attack.

The First Cyber Theft – Blanc Brothers, 1834

Crazy right? Cyber attacks already started before the birth of Einstein. Information is being shared through various means, and there are people actively seeking how to exploit these systems that have information passing through them, even before the internet boom; 1834 was a very long time ago.

The first cyber attack occurred in France in 1834, by two brothers, François and Joseph Blanc. They aimed to hack into the French Telegraphy system to gain an advantage in the stock market. During that time, telegraphs were widely used and popular for efficiently transmitting messages over long distances using electrical signals. Stockbrokers and government offices would often store details containing stock prices, transactions, and more in physical ledgers, and the details in these ledgers would be transmitted over long distances using telegraph lines through the use of Morse Code, a system of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers.

With this, the Blanc Brothers realized that if they could intercept the telegraph messages, they would have access to the necessary financial information to make more profits off the market. 

How did they do it?

Telegraph lines use a network of wires between towers with operators in stations along the route these wires pass. The operators would receive the electrical signals from these wires and then transcribe them to Morse code, and then the message would be passed to the next station until it reached its destination.

The Blanc brothers were able to detect that the telegraph system that the government uses for these financial communications was not encrypted (Encryption is the process of converting plain text or data into a coded form to prevent unauthorized access); the messages were transmitted in plaintext Morse code that anyone could easily intercept and read. During this time, there were no cybersecurity threats as we have today, so the government wasn’t worried about encrypting the information passing the telegraph wires. 

With the use of magnets, the brothers were able to tap into the telegraph wires outside the stations and intercept the communications, so you could say the first cyber attack was carried out with a magnet. The brother then decoded the messages and used the ones related to financial transactions, which gave them a sneak peek at the financial news up to a day before it reached its destination: Paris. 

This attack opened up the vulnerabilities in electrical systems that transmit and store information. 

Types of Cyber Attacks on Financial Institutions

The way Bank A would be attacked is very different from how Bank B would be attacked; hackers have different innovative and structural ways of attacking an organization; one of the most prominent ways is Ransomware. 

Ransomware:

This is a form of malware that attackers use to hold the attacked organization’s data hostage, and it can only be released if the victim pays a sum of money to the attackers, which is always paid through cryptocurrency because of the anonymity it gives to the attackers.

Ransomware works by infecting the victim’s system through phishing (another method of cyber attack) or malicious attachments, which could make the victim execute the ransomware code. Once executed inside the victim’s system, the malware searches for valuable documents and databases and encrypts them using a very strong encrypting algorithm; this makes the encrypted files inaccessible to the user without the encryption key that could only be provided by the attacker after payment of money to him by the victim. 

However, sometimes, the attacker does not provide the encryption key even after payment. If they do, sometimes, the decryption process might not succeed, leaving the victim losing a large sum of money and data. 

2023 was a year of a major ransomware boom; many cyberattacks were carried out with ransomware, and one of the victims was China’s Biggest Bank, ICBC.

China’s ICBC Cyber Attack, 2023

In November 2023, China’s Biggest Bank, the biggest bank in the world, got hit by a ransomware attack that led to disruptions in the trading of U.S. Treasuries, leading them to make trades via USB sticks.

While the Chinese government didin’t provide in-depth details about the attack, Marcus Murray said the ransomware used was LockBit 3.0, developed by the hacker group LockBit. 

ICBC gave no details about the attackers and the amount they requested. 

LockBit is a gang of criminals that has ties with Russia, according to the Economic Times. They specialize in using malicious software to encrypt files on their victim’s computers and then demanding payment to unlock them. They were the world’s most prolific ransomware attackers in 2022 and were responsible for 44% of all ransomware incidents globally, causing over 1,700 ransomware attacks in the United States between January 2020 and May 2023.

DDoS Attacks

As of March 2023, over 75% of all attacks against companies and governments were carried out using DDoS, according to StationX.

DDoS, also known as Distributed Denial-of-Service, is a type of cyber attack that overloads a bank’s servers with a ton of internet traffic, thus making the systems unavailable to legitimate users and affecting the service access and performance of the organization’s website. This forces a victim server to go offline by loading with fake connection requests or traffic.

In 2020, the finance industry experienced a 30% increase in DDoS attacks. Banks are sometimes being attacked with DDoS by disgruntled employees, hacktivists (activists who are also hackers), or hackers who want to show off. 

Capital One Corp DDoS Attack, 2012

In 2012, Cyber Fighters, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, blocked access to six major banks in the U.S., including Capital One. The bank’s website became completely unavailable on the afternoon of October 9, 2012.

The attack included flooding a target service of Capital One with an overwhelming amount of traffic, which rendered it inaccessible to it’s users; this disrupted the bank’s services, and customers were not able to access their accounts, make transactions, or even perform any banking activity., 

After the attack, Capital One implemented measures to reduce the impact of the attack by deploying additional security measures. 

State of Cyber Theft and Cyber Security in Africa


In 2022, according to Statista, over 31% of surveyed companies in East Africa experienced a Cyber attack; compared to the Southern part of Africa, with a 23% rate, East African firms have a higher rate of cyber attacks.

In March 2023, the rate of cyber attacks on African organizations increased by 76%, and there have been over 18% successful attacks on financial organizations in Africa. The increase in these attacks is due to the lack of information security infrastructure; about 90% of African businesses operate without Cybersecurity protocols, which makes them very vulnerable to cyber threats and theft.

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