Virtual Roundtable: Understanding the Cyber Threats and Actors Exploiting the COVID-19 Crisis

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Connect with the House Financial Services Committee
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On Thursday, May 28, 2020, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. (ET), National Security, International
Development, and Monetary Policy Subcommittee Chairman Cleaver and Ranking Member Hill
will host a virtual roundtable entitled, “Understanding the Cyber Threats and Actors Exploiting
the COVID-19 Crisis” with the following panelists:

• Mr. Tom Kellermann, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy, VMware
• Mr. Guillermo Christensen, Partner, Data Security and Privacy Practice, Ice Miller LLP
• Mr. Naftali Harris, Co-founder and CEO, SentiLink

Background
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), “the number of cybersecurity complaints to the IC3 in the last four months has spiked from 1,000 daily before the pandemic to as many as 4,000 incidents in a day.” The increase in cybercrime reports in the same period of the COVID-19 crisis are alone near the total reported amount of 2019 complaints.

The financial services sector, already facing the challenges of countering sophisticated cybercriminals, is under increased duress due to COVID-19 related cyber-criminal activity. A May 2020 survey of financial institutions (FIs) found that 80% of surveyed banks report a year-on-year increase in cyberattacks against the sector surging 238% during the COVID-19 crisis (FebruaryApril 2020). The volume of attacks, as reported by many of the largest FIs, moved across the globe towards the U.S. in line with the movement of the virus and has continued to ebb and flow with the undulations of the COVID-19 news cycle.

These vulnerabilities are exacerbated by the unusually large numbers of American employees that are working remotely. According to the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), employees working remotely outside of established firewalls and safety procedures have made it harder to combat cyberattacks. The technology to support remote work – such as Virtual Private Networks, DNS routers, telework, cloud deployments, and videoconferencing platforms – has the potential to introduce new points of exploitable weakness for opportunistic cybercriminals. Strains on IT and cybersecurity staff as a result of illness or stayat-home orders can result in slower updates to software and maintenance to systems. Additionally, poor home-based digital hygiene (including weak passwords on personal computers, poorly secured home Wi-Fi routers, or a linked family member’s internet-connected device) increases the possibility that an employee might unintentionally pass a computer virus to the company’s main
system.

Many Americans have already been victims of cyber breaches, whether leaked directly or through other parties. As a result, their personally identifiable information (PII), such as social security numbers and dates of birth, is already available for purchase on the dark web.8 Criminals can use this to apply for state and federal benefits and to perpetrate other types of fraud. Synthetic identification, where the entire “person” is fake, but built by criminals combining fake information with real, verifiable PII built up over time, is also used increasingly to exploit the financial services sector. This hard-to-detect fraud has, in 2018 alone, directly impacted 14.4 million consumers and resulted in losses of approximately $14.7 billion.