While the number of cyberattacks increase, there have been some even bolder cyberattacks done now than ever before. For sure there have been massive breaches from various companies, but now cyberattacks are happening to banks.

Cyberattacks on financial institutions have been increasingly linked to nation-states that have been causing a variety of disruptions on many levels. After all, the states that are behind the vast majority of these attacks are countries like Iran, Russia, North Korea, and China.

But what’s disheartening is that the report that was released that outlines these cyberattacks noted that there were only two attacks in 2016 and 2017 that were linked to those countries. That number jumped to six in 2018.

The report also talked about the growing concerns due to the vulnerable state of our financial system to these threats. Tim Maurer, the co-director at Carnegie Endowment for International Pease said:

“Now banks have to defend against not only cyber criminals and politically-motivated disruptions, usually of a temporary nature, but large-scale theft pursued by a nation-state. This evolution of the threat has forced regulators and industry worldwide to shift their attention from mitigating firm-specific risks to increasingly focus on sector- and system-wide risks.”

State-sponsored attacks refer to operations including direct nation-state activity and proxy activity that’s done by so called hacktivists.