The list of prominent targets in the sights of hackers grew longer today as confirmation came of an apparent attack on the U.S. Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that one of its internal websites had been briefly breached by hackers, though no critical functions of the U.S. central bank were affected by the intrusion.
The Federal Reserve says the hack took place on Super Bowl Sunday. The announcement came shortly after hacktivist group Anonymous claimed to have succeeded at breaking through the Fed’s security systems.
“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Fed spokesperson tells Reuters. “Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system.
Questions, however, still remain with regard to the nature and scope of the information that was acquired by hackers during the attack.
“Every system is going to have some vulnerability to it. You cannot set up a system that will survive all possible attacks,” said Mark Rasch, director of Privacy and security consulting at CSC. “You have to defend against every possible vulnerability and the attackers only have to find one way in.”
