Earlier this month, approximate 76 million households — or roughly half of the households in America — were unhappy to hear their JPMorgan Chase accounts had been compromised. Those 76 million households will be equally unhappy to learn that the hackers who broke in were wandering around the bank’s servers for two months. Two whole months!
The New York Times just revealed the length of the breach in a lengthy feature on the state of cyber security in the financial services industry. (Spoiler: it stinks.) The paper did note that “it is not uncommon for hackers to rummage through a big company’s network for several months before being detected.” In fact, The New York Times itself was hacked for four straight months. That doesn’t make the details from the JPMorgan any less unsettling, though.
So this is the brave new world that Wall Street is struggling to navigate. The Grey Lady has deemed JPMorgan and banks like it as “too big to secure,” in part because so many third party relationships are potential security vulnerabilities. JPMorgan says that it doesn’t think a third party compromised its systems this time around. But again, that’s not much consolation to the half of America that just got hacked. [NYT]