Obama Had Security Fears on JPMorgan Data Breach
President Obama and his top national security advisers began receiving periodic briefings on the huge cyberattack at JPMorgan Chase and other financial institutions this summer, part of a new effort to keep security officials as updated on major cyberattacks as they are on Russian incursions into Ukraine or attacks by the Islamic State.
But in the JPMorgan case, according to administration officials familiar with the briefings, who would not speak on the record about intelligence matters, no one could tell the president what he most wanted to know: What was the motive of the attack?
But questions are being asked across Wall Street as other targets emerge. The F.B.I., after being contacted by JPMorgan, took the I.P. addresses the hackers were believed to have used to breach JPMorgan’s system to other financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank and Bank of America, these people said.
In all, the authorities believe that the hackers may have tried to infiltrate about a dozen financial institutions, said one of the people briefed on the matter. Fidelity Investments and E*Trade are among those institutions that law enforcement officials believe were victimized in some way by the attacks, the person said.
JPMorgan has said that the attackers obtained names and some email addresses but did not penetrate enough to get account information, and that there was no evidence of any illicit movement of money across the 76 million affected households.
The F.B.I. has begun a criminal inquiry into the attacks, and the Secret Service has been involved as well. But the scale and breadth of the attacks — and the lack of clarity about the hackers’ identity or motive — show not only the vulnerability of the most heavily fortified American financial institutions but also the difficulty, despite billions of dollars spent in detection technology, in finding the sources of attack.
Under federal and state law, JPMorgan did not have to alert customers about the breach because it had determined that only contact data was breached.
The data breach at JPMorgan Chase was among “the most troubling breaches ever,” Ms. Madigan said, adding that it proved “there is probably no database that cybercriminals cannot compromise.”
Source: NYT- Obama Had Security Fears on JPMorgan Data Breach
