JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Becomes Victim of Russian Cyber Attack

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) became the victim of a hack attack from Russian Hackers recently and FBI is conducting an investigation on this and other related attacks. Many people believe the attacks on JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) servers to be a result of the sanctions imposed by U.S. and European Union on Russia for its role in helping the Ukrainian insurgents. Anna Edwards and Guy Johnson discussed the hack attack on JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) and the ongoing FBI investigation on it on Bloomberg, recently.

“Two people familiar from the investigation are telling Bloomberg that Russian hackers have attacked JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) and at least four other banks, during the month of August resulting in a loss of gigabytes of customer data. Now, one of the five banks has specifically linked these attacks to Russian state-backed hackers. The FBI is investigation as to whether it is a retaliatory action against U.S. sanctions […],” Edwards said.

Edwards also revealed that NSA is helping FBI in this investigation and the data stolen includes sensitive data from employees’ computers and customers’ account information, though it’s not clear whether this information has been used to transfer or withdraw any money from the compromised accounts.

According to Edwards, it’s proving hard to actually pinpoint from where these attacks have been done from as some of them have been routed from Latin America and other regions, but since the servers used are those that are typically used by Russian hackers, FBI and others believe that Russian hackers are behind this attack. She mentioned that a flaw in computers, called ‘zero day’ is being used in these attacks to gain remote access of customers’ computers, thereby making it easy for hackers to bypass the layers of security that firms like JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) deploy in their systems.

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