When 50 major financial firms, the Department of Homeland Security,
the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve team up to see if they could to
keep the market from crashing in the event of a major cyberattack, you
know people are starting to get nervous.
That's precisely the scenario underway today down on Wall Street, in a
large-scale coordinated cybersecurity drill called Quantum Dawn 2.
The mock attack, organized by the Securities Industry and Financial
Markets Association (SIFMA), is executed by a software tool that
simulates a stream of security breaches. Bankers are giving snippets of
"vague and confusing" information about what's going on—slow trading,
viruses in the system—and must put their heads together to decide what
to do, Reuters reported.
As the afternoon progresses, the threat escalates, and the attacks
become more intense. SIFMA will give the firms feedback on how they did
in a few weeks.
Though I can't shake the absurd image of hundreds of bankers and
government officials running around skyscrapers trying to thwart
online espionage, this is something the US is taking very
seriously. Cyberattack drills are a rising trend as hackers target US
firms more frequently, with larger and more sophisticated attacks. The
number of attacks on U.S. companies rose 42 percent last year, according
to a recent Symantec report.
For the rest of the story: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/wall-street-is-mock-hacking-itself-to-prepare-for-a-massive-cyber-attack
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