Hackers Compromise the World Bank - Reflections on Indian IT Security

According to this article from the USA Today, Hackers broke into 18 Servers at the World Bank and had access to and possibly stole sensitive information from at-least 5 of the servers. Indian Banks have been relatively lucky, facing a majority of phishing/scam attacks rather then out-right "Hack" attempts from skilled organized criminals such as these.

Throughout my time as a Security Professional whenever discussing Financial Fraud, Phishing and other attacks faced by Banks & Financial Institutions, I have always been of the opinion that they will soon face much more devastating attacks that will make the current attempts pale in comparison.

Why the pessimistic view? Well its simple.

Attackers have always been "creative" coming up with new and complicated schemes in-order to get access to Credit-Card details and Banking Information. The reason they have the time and ability to do so is: Economics. Bottom-line is that most of these attackers are walking away with fistfuls of money at the expense of Banks and their Customers.

If we consider a typical phishing scam, an attacker would send out a million e-mails (approximation) with a success rate at best of 1% (a very generous number considering that a good percent would be picked up by Anti-Spam, Anti-phishing, Mistargeted Users, Smart Users etc) they will walk away with 10000 working banking details.

Instead if the attacker starts targeting servers belonging to Banks, systems belonging to Bank Employees and more importantly any of the thousands of Indian Shopping web-sites with Exposed Customer Information, SQL Injection vulnerabilities etc they could walk away with 100K - 200K Credit-Card details or Banking Information.

As a matter of fact, last week, a colleague of mine ordered for a product from one of the most popular Indian Shopping Portals. When the product was delivered; the label was a print-out invoice at the bottom of which was the URL: http://shopping-website/ecommerce/admin/vieworders.php. After typing this into the browser we were shown WITHOUT AUTHENTICATION plain-text Credit Card details, Order Information, Banking Details etc.

This for sure is one reason, why I do-not personally carry out Online Banking or Shopping besides for maybe on Amazon.com or my Bank Account with Free Fraud Insurance.