The Los Angeles Post

BANKERS BEWARE

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Lawmakers on Tuesday received a loud warning about the danger of hackers zeroing in on financial institutions as prime targets during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“America is grappling with a cyber insurgency and our financial sector is the number one target,” Tom Kellermann, a former member of a presidential cybersecurity commission during the Obama administration, told a House Financial Services subcommittee during a Tuesday hearing on the threat.

While cybersecurity has long been a major issue for the financial sector, a huge spike in cyberattacks in connection to the COVID-19 pandemic has only underlined the risks.

Kellermann now heads cybersecurity strategy at VMWare, a software company that released a report last month reporting a 238 percent surge in cyberattacks against banks between February and April.

Many of these cyberattacks stem from non-affiliated malicious actors, but experts warn that Russia, China and North Korea also may be targeting financial institutions during the pandemic.

“State-sponsored hacking is the biggest threat to our financial sector because of the capacities that they can bring to bear,” Jamil Jaffer, the founder and executive director of George Mason University’s National Security Institute, testified at the same hearing. “They have almost unlimited resources…you just can’t beat a nation state at their own game.”

Jaffer argued that Congress needed to spearhead efforts to bring the financial sector together to protect the whole instead of individual companies in order to fight back against nation state threats.

“We don’t expect Target and Walmart to defend against Russian Bear bombers coming across the horizon, yet today in cyberspace we expect exactly that of JPMorgan and Citibank,” said Jaffer, who also serves as vice president for Strategy, Partnerships & Corporate Development at IronNet Cybersecurity. “That is simply an unsustainable scenario, and we have got to bring the nation together, large banks have to protect small banks.”

Members of the House Financial Services subcommittee on national security, international development, and monetary policy rolled out a raft of bills during Tuesday’s hearing that are designed to fend off hackers.