Security News
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, known as Te Pūtea Matua, has suffered a data breach after threat actors hacked a third-party hosting partner. The Reserve Bank is the central bank of New Zealand and is responsible for creating monetary policy to stabilize prices in the country.
New Zealand's central bank said Sunday it was responding with urgency to a "Malicious" breach of one of its data systems, a third-party file sharing service that stored "Sensitive information". Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor Adrian Orr said the breach had been contained and the system was taken offline but it would take time to determine what information had been accessed.
Lacework, a five-year-old cybersecurity company that automates security across enterprise cloud deployments, has reached unicorn status with the closing of a $525 million round of Series D financing. The Silicon Valley company, which automates security across public and private cloud deployments, is now valued north of $1 billion.
Cloud-delivered network security startup iboss on Tuesday announced the closing of a new $145 million financing deal to speed up growth in a lucrative market. Iboss, founded by twin brothers Paul and Peter Martini five years ago, previously banked $35 million in venture capital funding from Goldman Sachs.
The Banner Bank executive leadership team announced that Janet Brown has joined the bank as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Brown is replacing Steve Rust who announced his retirement after more than 40 years in information technology, the last 15 years as CIO at Banner Bank.
Threat actors behind an ongoing worldwide mobile banking fraud campaign were able to steal millions from multiple US and EU banks, needing just a few days for each attack. While emulators are not malicious tools, the group behind this campaign used them for malicious purposes emulating compromised devices or setting up what looked like new devices picked up by the compromised accounts' owners.
Today, banks must contend with near-constant cyber attacks from organized criminal gangs, as well as highly skilled and well-resourced threat actors working on behalf of nation-states. The cyber threats facing banks are exacerbated by a large and complex infrastructure that presents threat actors with an extensive attack surface, allowing them to strike network infrastructure and systems like SWIFT, employees, customers, and physical assets like ATMs. The extent of these threats demands a proactive and persistent security program.
Okta announced significant momentum in the financial services industry with new and expanded deployments for Canadian Western Bank, First National of Nebraska, and Nota, powered by M&T Bank. Following a successful rollout of the Okta Identity Cloud across its workforce, Canadian Western Bank decided to expand its deployment to include Okta Customer Identity and to support its goal of creating a consistent customer experience across all lines of business.
An offshore Cayman Islands bank's backups, covering a $500 million investment portfolio, were left unsecured and leaking personal banking information, passport data and even online banking PINs. Once evidence was given to the bank of the exposed data, the information was passed onto a bank staffer with a college computer science background, the report added.
"The traditional processes that banks and other financial institutions employ are a bit resource-intensive and often those processes are manual so they've innovated to add some software modeling in an attempt to draw inferences from patterns that they see in their transactions and in their operations to help inform a potential theft, fraud or money laundering," said Michael Reed, director of the Blockchain Program at Intel. "But even those have high false-positive rates which can be disruptive to their customer relationships and also just cost them more time and money in their operations. Confidential computing is a new tool that banks and other corporations are using to help address their own security challenges. It's an emerging technology that helps secure data while it's in use."