This couple of weeks have been incredible how the cybersecurity has been hit on many different areas. It seems the 'great hardening' are taking victims and even when the world is not ready, it still happening. The latest, a bank in Paraguay has been hit with what I bet is a grand hack and has rendered the bank useless and bankrupted. The key here is that the bank would not confirm this, and it will rather shut down than say what caused these leak of funds.
Let's understand something first. Binance, went on to explain what happened exactly, and it said it was one of the engineers taking a job interview on it's work laptop and it got compromised and the attackers got access to the company data. Something that I am personally still skeptic as a VLAN would keep the employees away from the software and the funds. It makes little sense that the attacker new enough to access the funds from an engineer laptop. But I'll take their word for it.
The other case of the bank, no real report was said about how they lost the funds. they just declared themselves insolvent. So assumptions have to made, one said that the government stole it, another that they had amounting debt and obligations they could no longer meet. My take? It got hacked just like Binance did. Why?
There is nothing inherently different that an attack on Binance as an institution couldn't happened to a regular bank. The attack has no link to crypto. Compromising an employee laptop could happen in any organization. It could be your accountant laptop with access to your concrete company, or medical company or government organization, etc.
But why banks won't say they got hacked?
Banks have a sworn oath to never accept they can possibly get hacked. They will rather go bankrupt than admit that they got hacked. Why? Admitting to a hack can trigger what we call a 'bank run'. A bank run is what happened when people go to the bank to take their funds out. This can put other banks at risk from experience these runs, and what happened if a few banks experience these runs? The whole industry will need the central bank to cover the money they don't have on site. Which if you know how bank works, is around 1% of the total amount.
So even a smaller banks, are subsidiaries of bigger banks, and is more convenient for the smaller bank to take the fall, than risk the run touch the main bank. This code of silence will bring a lot uncertainty and missdirection on what is the real problem, which is the quick obsolescence of the cybersecurity rules. Lack of transparency will make it harder for the rest of the people to learn how to secure their systems, their assets and beyond.
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