Recent Attacks Appear Linked to Iran

The New York Times reports that recent attacks against US financial institutions may have been state-sponsored attacks from groups linked to Iran.

The current round of attacks are different from most previous attacks in that they are not aimed at either denial of service or fraud, but at causing permanent damage to the systems under attack.

Financial services companies have paid lip service to computer security for a long time, while avoiding the costs associated with any best practices they could rationalize away. It will be interesting to see if the recent attacks will wake up the financial services companies to take information security seriously.