Publications Details

Threats to financial system security

Mcgovern, D.E.

The financial system in the United States is slowly migrating from the bricks and mortar of banks on the city square to branch banks, ATM`s, and now direct linkage through computers to the home. Much work has been devoted to the security problems inherent in protecting property and people. The impact of attacks on the information aspects of the financial system has, however, received less attention. Awareness is raised through publicized events such as the junk bond fraud perpetrated by Milken or gross mismanagement in the failure of the Barings Bank through unsupervised trading activities by Leeson in Singapore. These events, although seemingly large (financial losses may be on the order of several billion dollars), are but small contributors to the estimated $114 billion loss to all types of financial fraud in 1993. Most of the losses can be traced to the contribution of many small attacks perpetrated against a variety of vulnerable components and systems. This paper explores the magnitude of these financial system losses and identifies new areas for security to be applied to high consequence events.