Public Matters blog

Is it just me or did anyone else find it strangely ironic that President Obama appointed Howard A. Schmidt as national cybersecurity coordinator on the same day that the Wall Street Journal uncovered a massive hacker attack on Citigroup that allegedly resulted in the loss of tens of millions of dollars?

Maybe they were waiting for the guy to sign on the bottom line before they dropped that bomb on him. Talk about responsibility.

In case you missed the Citigroup story, the bank is denying the report and any losses, but the Journal is sticking by its story.

Citing anonymous government officials, the Journal reported that the hackers were connected to a Russian cyber gang. Two other computer systems, at least one of connected to a U.S. government agency, were also attacked … The Journal reported that the attack on Citigroup’s Citibank subsidiary was detected over the summer, although it may have occurred up to one year earlier. The FBI, the National Security Agency, the Homeland Security Department and Citigroup worked together to investigate the attack.

But apparently, Internet attacks on banks are very common (which isn’t surprising since, well, that’s where the money is), says Tom Kellermann, a former senior member of the World Bank’s Treasury security team and now vice president of security awareness for Core Security Technologies.

“Ninety-eight percent of bank heists are now occurring virtually and not in the real world,” he said, adding that the industry is “hemorrhaging funds” as a result.

Hemorrhaging funds, huh? That’s never a term you want to hear, in any context, really.

And the worst part is that even if the government or a corporation is able to identify and catch these hackers, it’s really hard to punish them. For example, Albert Gonzalez, the infamous hacker who stole 130 million credit cards from various retailers, card processing companies, a series of foreign banks and a brokerage house has agreed not to be sentenced to less than 17 years in prison, which frankly is a pretty darn good deal, right?

I guess he was quite cooperative with authorities (including telling them where he buried the $1.1 million in his parent’s backyard). Perhaps this new Schmidt fella should just acknowledge right off the bat that the government has neither the people nor the resources to adequately fight off these hacker attacks and just give Gonzalez a job to pass the time.