US banking supervision infiltrated for 21 months
Strangers broke into the Comptroller of the Currency via an administrator account. They could read how money laundering and terrorist financing are combated.
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A break-in into the email system of the US banking supervisory authority was apparently more serious than initially assumed internally: The perpetrator managed to gain access to more email accounts at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) than was originally apparent.
This was reported by Bloomberg Law, citing unnamed insiders. According to the report, the perpetrator hacked an administrator account in June 2023 and used it to infiltrate numerous email accounts of OCC officials. The federal agency OCC supervises banks and savings banks operating in the USA, is responsible for enforcing regulations to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, and is intended to strengthen competition in the industry. Relevant insider information can be worth its weight in gold for both speculators and organized criminals.
Around 100 people affected
The break-in only came to light around 21 months later, in February. The OCC then published a taciturn announcement stating that a “limited number” of email accounts had been affected. These had been shut down. The OCC said at the time that there was no evidence of any impact on the financial sector “at this time”.
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According to Bloomberg Law, a total of around 100 officials are among those affected, including high-ranking managers and supervisors of international banks. The perpetrators had access to more than 150,000 emails. Last year, the authority had a total of 3,630 employees (full-time equivalents). It is not yet known who is behind the successful attack.
The OCC was founded in 1863 and is an independent division of the US Treasury Department. At the beginning of the year, the OCC had to admit that it had been the victim of an IT attack from the People's Republic of China. The perpetrator had remotely gained access to several computers of the Ministry of Finance and the non-classified documents on them. The Chinese Foreign Ministry denied the allegations and stated that there was no evidence.
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