The fox in the henhouse

Robert Vamosi has the scoop on a joint study by the United States Secret Service and the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute (CERT) on computer crime called "Insider Threat Study: Illicit Cyber Activity in the Banking and Finance Sector." [PDF]

Of the financial cybercrimes studied, 87 percent were accomplished without sophisticated programming trickery, and in 78 percent of those events, the attackers were authorized financial institution users, often employees, seeking financial gain through known flaws in the system. In other words, we shouldn't always suspect that it's some script kiddie in Romania breaking into our banks and financial services institutions; maybe it's the person sitting in the cubicle in the center of the bank.