Posts Tagged: "cyber crime"

Regulations will likely start rolling out in the coming year starting at the state level. In May of last year, for example, the New York State Department of Financial Services released a report which said that the agency would add cybersecurity measures to the list of items that it investigates when evaluating a bank’s overall safety and soundness. New York, and New York City in particular, is home to a huge banking industry that represents some of our nation’s largest financial institutions, including American Express, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. According to remarks made by NYS DFS Superintendent Benjamin Lawsky in late February, state regulations could involve the use of multi-layer authentication systems for firms regulated by the DFS.

Throughout 2014, stories of major data breaches and hacking incidents have dominated the mainstream media. Customers of major corporations like Target, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Neiman Marcus have been the targets of malware, phishing schemes and other malicious acts of cyber crime within the past year. As a result, hackers have gained access to private information pertaining to tens of millions of financial accounts…. During 2013, there were a total of 7,577 patent applications filed with the USPTO in the field of cybersecurity. The vast majority of these patent applications are coming from the United States, with the most filings coming from the states of California, New York and Texas. The top five companies filing patents within this field were IBM, Symantec, Google, Microsoft and Samsung.

Home Depot may be the latest and largest breach to become news, but it’s certainly not the only one and hacking activity seems to be ramping up in the past few months. Malicious software known as Backoff, responsible for the Target breach, has also been identified as a potential culprit in recent breaches at Dairy Queen, Supervalu and United Parcel Service. Law enforcement officials have theorized that an Eastern European group may be responsible for a majority of these breaches because of links to Ukraine in the malware’s code… [R]ecent data breaches at major corporations have agitated some financial technology developers to look for more secure options for conducting transactions without cash. Many are touting a new wave of debit and credit cards which have microchips that improve data security as a possible answer.