Wall Street firm hit by cyberattack that has knocked systems offline

-

 


New YorkCNN — 

EquiLend, a Wall Street firm that processes trillions of dollars of securities transactions a month, was hit by a cyberattack that has knocked some of its systems offline, the company said Wednesday.

The financial technology firm, owned by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and other major Wall Street firms, said in a statement to CNN that it could take “several days” before services are fully restored.

In the statement, EquiLend spokesperson Christopher Gohlke said that on Monday the company “identified a technical issue that placed portions of our systems offline.”

EquiLend said it is working with outside cybersecurity firms and other advisers to investigate the attack and bring services back online.

“We immediately launched an investigation and have identified a cyber security incident involving unauthorized access to our systems,” Gohlke said. “We took immediate steps to secure our systems and are working methodically to restore the involved services as quickly as possible.”

EquiLend, owned by a consortium of Wall Street firms including BlackRock and Bank of America, is a significant player in the securities-lending industry through its NGT trading platform. Hedge funds and other investors rely on securities lending firms to make short bets against the value of securities.

The impact on financial market players has been “limited,” a spokesperson for FS-ISAC, a global consortium of financial institutions who share cybersecurity intelligence, told CNN in a statement.

The FS-ISAC spokesperson said the hack impacted specific automated securities lending services, causing firms to adjust by moving to manual processes.

“The sector is monitoring for any ongoing issues,” the FS-ISAC spokesperson said, “and coordinating through our established incident response processes and resilience mechanisms to ensure firms have the information they need to mitigate potential impacts.”

US officials are keeping tabs on the hack.


Reference: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/24/business/wall-street-firm-cyberattack/index.html 


AH 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CISA and ENISA enhance their Cooperation

-
Image
  The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has signed a Working Arrangement with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the US, in the areas of capacity-building, best practices exchange and boosting situational awareness. Geopolitics have shaped the cyber threat landscape, bringing like-minded partners closer together in the wake of common cyber challenges and advances in digital technologies. Today at the EU-US Cyber Dialogue, ENISA and CISA announced the signing of their Working Arrangement as an important milestone in the overall cooperation between the United States and the European Union in the field of cybersecurity, also following the Joint Statement of European Commissioner Thierry Breton and U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas of January 2023. ENISA’s International Strategy directs the Agency to be selective in engaging with international partners and to limit its overall approach in international cooperation to those...
Read more

Top Five Most Exploited Vulnerabilities in January 2024

-
Image
In January 2024, cybersecurity faced a remarkable surge in threats, with a focus on exploiting vulnerabilities in technologies from leading vendors. This spike in cyber attacks highlighted the urgent necessity for robust security posture and swift responses to mitigate these vulnerabilities.  Below is an in-depth analysis of the most critical vulnerabilities targeted during January. CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887:   CISA Warns Against Ivanti Zero-Day Vulnerabilities On January 19, 2024, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert regarding two critical zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in Ivanti products:  CVE-2023-46805 and  CVE-2024-21887.  Assigned CVSS scores of 8.2 (High) and 9.1 (Critical), these vulnerabilities underscore a significant risk to cybersecurity, marked by their capability for arbitrary command execution. This prompted an emergency directive for immediate mitigation within federal agencies, highlighting the...
Read more

SmartScreen Vulnerability: CVE-2024-21412 Facts and Fixes

-
Image
On Feb. 13, 2024, Microsoft issued a  patch  for CVE-2024-21412, a  Microsoft Defender SmartScreen  vulnerability revolving around internet shortcuts. Previously, we discovered that an advanced persistent threat (APT) group we track under the name Water Hydra has been exploiting CVE-2024-21412 in a sophisticated campaign targeting financial market traders, allowing the group to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen and infect its victims with the DarkMe remote access trojan (RAT). Threat actors are constantly finding new ways of identifying and exploiting gaps to bypass security measures. We found that the bypass of CVE-2023-36025 (a previously patched SmartScreen vulnerability) led to the discovery and exploitation of CVE-2024-21412. This highlights how threat actors can circumvent patches by identifying new vectors of attack around a patched software component. It is important that organizations are able to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities, especiall...
Read more