The Secret Service may be best known for their role as the President’s guardians, but it’s their role protecting the U.S. currency that has them guarding all forms of payment and financial systems, and actively pursuing cybercriminals – even internationally. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) notes that in 2010, “the Secret Service arrested more than 1,200 suspects for cybercrime violations. These investigations involved over $500 million in actual fraud loss and prevented approximately $7 billion in additional losses”. Their efforts may be a significant factor in 2010’s fairly dramatic decrease in the volume of compromised records.

The conviction of Albert Gonzales, and 20 year prison sentence for his role in the TJX and Heartland Payment System Breaches, was just one of several big wins for the agency that’s noted in the report. Of course, where vast sums of money are at stake, cybercriminals will evolve and evade.

In 2010 the DBIR notes a shift from massive credit card fraud to the much more targeted “Account Takeover” (ATO) attack. Leading the way was Zeus and related malware that’s built specifically to capture the login credentials to online banking. Once these credentials are acquired they’re used to initiate transfers from the victim’s account to one or more “mule” accounts which the attacker also controls. In some cases 10’s of thousands and even 100’s of thousands of dollars disappear in a matter of minutes.

There are some well publicized defensive measures you can take with regard to ATO, and we’ll touch on some of these in an upcoming post, but for now it’s important to note that this is a very lucrative attack and one that’s pointed squarely at midmarket organizations – particularly midmarket executives.   Your networks are considered easy prey, and you are easy to identify – think social media, and linked-in profiles.

The Secret Service is working to address this threat and in cooperation with a number of agencies and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), they’ve created the Account Takeover Task Force.

While they may not need to “take a bullet” for us, we know that defending financial systems is a complex task that spans the globe, so we just wanted to take a moment to recognize their efforts and say, “Thanks”.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from TriGeoSphere authored by Michael Maloof. Read the original post at: http://blog.trigeo.com/2011/secret-service-guarding-presidents-and-payments/