This warning signal is based on the past and even recent Russian hacker activity. Russian hackers penetrated the NASDAQ stock exchange business servers sometime between November 2005 to October 2010 and have installed malicious software. After doing this, they accessed those servers and their commands were to delete, change or steal data.
It is clearly a new approach from the hackers and direct attacks on financial exchanges is on a growing trend.
Groups of cyber criminals were stopped and charged for their illegal activities. This includes a 7 year period when they infiltrated the largest U.S. corporations stealing more than 160 million credit card numbers. Manipulating data and cloning cards, they produced a loss of several hundreds million dollars. Among business names that have suffered from these attacks are Jet Blue, JCPenney and DowJones. The stolen money was extracted through ATM’s worldwide.
On the other part, federal authorities were able to track and expose the illegal activities. One of the largest hackers group was even prosecuted in the U.S. , including the famous Alexandr Kalinin, the indictments were pronounced Thursday, this week.
