14 DAY TRIAL // The US Commerce bank has been attacked by a hacker. The malicious user tried to do as much damage as he could, be he was quickly repelled.
It's not often that we hear of such a thing, so that's why I'm calling it a good piece of news. Now, let me tell you - hackers attack banks, companies, organizations daily. That's just snafu and nothing can be done about it. These attacks usually end up in two ways - either the victim has low security or the hackers really know how to do their work, and they bypass every defense system, causing a lot of damage; or the victim's cyber-security fortress withstands the attack and remains unscratched. But this case is a bit different...
Commerce Bank said that, this week, a hacker managed to get to a database of 3.000 customer records but only accessed 20 of them, as seen in a report by PC Advisor. The good news is that the hacking was quickly detected and stopped. This is why I said that this situation was different; usually, if a hacker manages to bypass security systems he reaches his goal. The cases in which the good guys succeed in stopping the bad dudes after they penetrate cyber-defenses are very few!
My congratulations go out to the people that have stopped the attack. Furthermore, the bank is acting the way they should, after the hack, fact which is another great thing! The first good measure they took was to acknowledge the hack; now they're informing the affected people of what has happened, as the same site informs. Anyway, hackers attack banks all the time, and not disclosing data leaks is the worst thing you could do. These information leaks can cause identity theft, fraud and who knows what else? So this is why security experts advise that companies should be transparent when they have issues such as data breaches.