14 DAY TRIAL // Documents obtained by CNN Money and Reuters reveal that, between 2011 and 2015, the US Federal Reserve, the country's central bank, suffered over 50 cyber-attacks labeled as breaches.
The 2,239-page document contained heavily redacted information about the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, and not the actual twelve banks spread across the US. These are privately owned, unlike the central branch that's government-funded, and thus, open to public inquiries.
Federal Reserve dealt with 310 cyber-related security events
The documents reveal that the Federal Reserve's cyber-security team created 310 reports, of which the they labeled 140 as hacking attempts.
Investigators marked four of these as "espionage." All four events happened in 2012, and the security team says that attackers got access to information in two of them.
The Fed's team also says they found "malicious code" in 134 events, fraud was attempted in 12 cases, and 59 incidents led to "unauthorized access."
The investigators also analyzed and logged 55 events marked as "information disclosure," a generic term that includes an actual data breach, but also an employee sending a sensitive email to the wrong person.
The Fed was at the heart of the SWIFT bank system hacks
The report comes at a bad time, when a group of hackers has robbed and attempted to rob multiple banks around the world via the SWIFT inter-bank transaction system. The Fed was at the core of the biggest of these heists, when crooks managed to steal $81 million from Bangladesh's bank account at the US Federal Reserver Bank in New York.
Because there are reports that speculate on the hacker's connection to North Korea, the House Technology Committee has started an investigation into the Federal Reserve's security measures.
The investigation was set in motion today, after the House Technology Committee read a letter to the US House of Representatives and asked for a formal inquiry. A copy of the letter can be seen embedded below.