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 * Cyber Attack Forces World’s Biggest Bank to Trade via USB Stick


CYBER ATTACK FORCES WORLD’S BIGGEST BANK TO TRADE VIA USB STICK

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China logo on a building in Warsaw, Poland, on
August 15, 2023.Jakub Porzycki—NurPhoto/Getty Images
By Katherine Doherty, Liz Capo McCormick and Alexandra Harris / Bloomberg
November 9, 2023 11:30 PM EST

On Thursday, trades handled by the world’s largest bank in the globe’s biggest
market traversed Manhattan on a USB stick.

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd.’s U.S. unit had been hit by a
cyberattack, rendering it unable to clear swathes of U.S. Treasury trades after
entities responsible for settling the transactions swiftly disconnected from the
stricken systems. That forced ICBC to send the required settlement details to
those parties by a messenger carrying a thumb drive as the state-owned lender
raced to limit the damage.


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The workaround — described by market participants — followed the attack by
suspected perpetrator Lockbit, a prolific criminal gang with ties to Russia that
has also been linked to hits on Boeing Co., ION Trading U.K. and the U.K.’s
Royal Mail. The strike caused immediate disruption as market-makers, brokerages
and banks were forced to reroute trades, with many uncertain when access would
resume.

The incident spotlights a danger that bank leaders concede keeps them up at
night — the prospect of a cyber attack that could someday cripple a key piece of
the financial system’s wiring, setting off a cascade of disruptions. Even brief
episodes prompt bank leaders and their government overseers to call for more
vigilance.



Read More: A New Generation of Bank Robbers Infiltrates Global Finance

“This is a true shock to large banks around the world,” said Marcus Murray, the
founder of Swedish cybersecurity firm Truesec. “The ICBC hack will make large
banks around the globe race to improve their defenses, starting today.”



As details of the attack emerged, employees at the bank’s Beijing headquarters
held urgent meetings with the lender’s U.S. division and notified regulators as
they discussed next steps and assessed the impact, according to a person
familiar with the matter. ICBC is considering seeking help from China’s Ministry
of State Security in light of the risks of potential attack on other units, the
person said.

Late Thursday, the bank confirmed it had experienced a ransomware attack a day
earlier that disrupted some systems at its ICBC Financial Services unit. The
company said it isolated the affected systems and that those at the bank’s head
office and other overseas units weren’t impacted, nor was ICBC’s New York
branch.



The extent of the disruption wasn’t immediately clear, though Treasury market
participants reported liquidity was affected. The Securities Industry and
Financial Markets Association, or Sifma, held calls with members about the
matter Thursday.

ICBC FS offers fixed-income clearing, Treasuries repo lending and some equities
securities lending. The unit had $23.5 billion of assets at the end of 2022,
according to its most recent annual filing with U.S. regulators.

The attack is only the latest to snarl parts of the global financial system.
Eight months ago, ION Trading U.K. — a little-known company that serves
derivatives traders worldwide — was hit by a ransomware attack that paralyzed
markets and forced trading shops that clear hundreds of billions of dollars of
transactions a day to process deals manually. That has put financial
institutions on high alert.

ICBC, the world’s largest lender by assets, has been improving its cybersecurity
in recent months, highlighting increased challenges from potential attacks amid
the expansion of online transactions, adoption of new technologies and open
banking.

Read More: How China Became a Global Lender of Last Resort

“The bank actively responded to new challenges of financial cybersecurity,
adhered to the bottom line for production safety and deepened the intelligent
transformation of operation and maintenance,” ICBC said in its interim report in
September.



Ransomware attacks against Chinese firms appear rare in part because China has
banned crypto-related transactions, according to Mattias Wåhlén, a threat
intelligence specialist at Truesec. That makes it harder for victims to pay
ransom, which is often demanded in cryptocurrency because that form of payment
provides more anonymity. 

But the latest attack likely exposes weaknesses in ICBC’s defenses, Wåhlén
said. 

“It appears ICBC has had a less effective security,” he said, “possibly because
Chinese banks have not been tested as much as their Western counterparts in the
past.” 


RECORD LEVELS

Ransomware hackers have become so prolific that attacks may hit record levels
this year. 

Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis had recorded roughly $500 million of
ransomware payments through the end of September, an increase of almost 50% from
the same period a year earlier. Ransomware attacks surged 95% in the first three
quarters of this year, compared with the same period in 2022, according to
Corvus Insurance.

In 2020, the website of the New Zealand Stock Exchange was hit by a cyberattack
that throttled traffic so severely that it couldn’t post critical market
announcements, forcing the entire operation to shut down. It was later revealed
that more than 100 banks, exchanges, insurers and other financial firms
worldwide were targets of the same type of so-called DDoS attacks
simultaneously.



Caesars Entertainment Inc., MGM Resorts International and Clorox Co. are among
companies that have been hit by ransomware hackers in recent months.

Read More: This Company Was Hit With a Devastating Ransomware Attack—But Instead
of Giving In, It Rebuilt Everything

ICBC was struck as the Securities and Exchange Commission works to reduce risks
in the financial system with a raft of proposals that include mandating central
clearing of all U.S. Treasuries. Central clearing platforms are intermediaries
between buyers and sellers that assume responsibility for completing
transactions and therefore prevent a default of one counterparty from causing
widespread problems in the marketplace.

The incident underscores the benefits of central clearing in the $26 trillion
market, said Stanford University finance professor Darrell Duffie.

“I view it as one example of why central clearing in the U.S. Treasuries market
is a very good idea,” he said, “because had a similar problem occurred in a
not-clearing firm, it’s not clear how the default risk that might result would
propagate through the market.”


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