Investor Alert: Cyber Tests Reveal Mission Failure from Investment Banks

Each business afternoon CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo opens her show with the mantra, “It’s four o’clock on Wall Street. Do you know where your money is?”

Financial industry cyber defense readiness exercises on July 18th produced an unsettling answer to her question: Don’t count on it.

Those who read my prior post on cyberattacks against the financial industry are aware that the effectiveness of the cyber defense “protecting” major Wall Street investment banks was tested on July 18th during an exercise dubbed “Quantum Dawn 2.”

More Cyberattacks Targeting Investment Firms Serving Individual Investors

In today’s Internet-centric world, cybercrime in all forms has become a way of life. Credit card information is stolen, personal identification compromised, and in what’s been described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” massive amounts of valuable intellectual property are being whisked away from U.S. companies and the U.S. Department of Defense.

And it’s all happening at an alarming rate.

Distorted Picture: NSA Surveillance Powers Expand as Data Escapes with Edward Snowden

Is NSA surveillance expanding to an increasingly wider range of personal data just to see it turned over to foreign intelligence agencies by the likes of Edward Snowden?

As reported in a New York Times article on July 6:

“The nation’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has quietly created a secret body of law expanding the National Security Agency’s power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in espionage and cyberattacks.”

On the one hand, it might look like the FISA court is allowing more personal surveillance for the sake of national security. But does this kind of rationalization make sense when we look at the massive data misappropriation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden?

Did Shakespeare Set the Stage for the Coming Wars in Cyberspace?

"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…"
–William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Little did Shakespeare know how these words describing the tightly defined stage in the early 17th century would be so appropriate in describing the global cyberspace stage of the early 21st century.

As today’s Act I begins, the stage is filled with actors possessing duplicity, deception, corruption and overreaching personal ambition, much as in Shakespeare’s day.

Let’s meet the cyber players in this 21st-century global cyber-saga: