When hackers took over the Associated Press’s Twitter account in 2013, a few fake tweets about a terrorist attack caused the stock market to take a nosedive. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have serious financial repercussions. In today’s data-driven markets, the consequences of uncertainty for the financial industry might be far greater.Īdmittedly, data-manipulation hacks are not as easily monetizable as ransomware, nor do they produce as much buzz as the public release of sensitive data. Ten years ago, an announcement by the banking group BNP set the 2007 financial crisis in motion because they said they didn’t know what securities linked to subprime mortgages were worth. But with data manipulation, the goal is to call the underlying information into question. When a hacker’s goal is to leak stolen information or hold data for ransom, their success depends on their ability to prove the information they hold is real. More broadly, data manipulation breeds uncertainty. Given that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in the US, there is plenty of reason to worry. A paper in the New England Journal of Medicine recently reported on the risks of data breaches in health systems, noting that a hacker could in theory change a single data point, such as the level of potassium in a patient’s blood, leading caregivers to provide incorrect and potentially lethal treatments. In the most extreme cases, such hacks could have deadly consequences. The site’s contents made clear it was not real (the purpose was to expose how easy it was to “phish”), but Equifax fell for cybersecurity’s equivalent of fake news, and it took 200,000 clicks before the company noticed.
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A software engineer set up a fake website claiming to help customers-and even Equifax linked to the fake site. Take the recent Equifax breach as an example. Unlike “information-gathering” hacks (where data is stolen because it is valuable) or “hold hostage” attacks (when data is imprisoned until someone pays to release it), “manipulation hacks” are hard to detect: They result when individuals (or bots) illegally change vital information below the threshold of attention. Now apply this thought experiment to banks, medical institutions, and government organizations.
Would the company even notice such changes happening? Could it still have the confidence that its backups were uncompromised? How could its investors accurately assess the company’s value when all of its financials might suddenly be based on faulty information? And how might its customers and suppliers respond? Small changes are made to food-safety tests so that a dangerous product that was failing suddenly looks like it is passing regulation tests. Figures are tweaked slightly on pending invoices to vendors, altering the company’s balance sheets by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Expiration dates on milk cartons get scrambled so that some are thrown away early while others make drinkers sick, despite appearing within their use-by date. But this time, instead of leaking the company’s proprietary information to the public or freezing its systems with ransomware, the hackers subtly manipulate the data on which the company relies.
Imagine that a major Big Food company gets hacked. But by focusing only on hackers’ efforts to extort money or mess with our political process, we may have been missing what is potentially an even scarier possibility: data manipulation.
election - has demonstrated how hackers can wreak havoc on our largest institutions. A recent wave of cyberattacks - from WannaCry and Equifax to the alleged Russian influence on the U.S.
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