Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

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dualstow
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Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by dualstow » Thu Jul 11, 2019 10:03 am

I read about cities like Baltimore getting hacked and temporarily losing services, e.g. property deed transfers. And I read about websites getting hit with ransomware and shut down until they pay.

What would happen if a big firm like Vanguard got hit?

Do they get attacked all the time and are quietly repelling all these attacks?

Could our holdings be locked up for a long period of time?

I suppose it depends on the specific nature of the attack, but- any ideas?
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Re: Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by Kriegsspiel » Thu Jul 11, 2019 11:44 am

dualstow wrote:
Thu Jul 11, 2019 10:03 am
I read about cities like Baltimore getting hacked and temporarily losing services, e.g. property deed transfers. And I read about websites getting hit with ransomware and shut down until they pay.

What would happen if a big firm like Vanguard got hit?

Do they get attacked all the time and are quietly repelling all these attacks?

Could our holdings be locked up for a long period of time?

I suppose it depends on the specific nature of the attack, but- any ideas?
I'm sure they're being attacked all the time, I don't know what their plan is if one succeeds. One thing that makes me feel better is not having a single point of failure in my finances.

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Re: Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by ochotona » Thu Jul 11, 2019 12:19 pm

I think a big financial house is going to have nearly real-time replication of their databases to multiple locations, or in Amazon Web Services lingo, availability zones... or even other regions in the USA or World.

If they got ransomware pervasively throughout part of their network in a bad way, I think they'd just fail-over to the other zones, or if was really terribly, terminate (destroy) all of their virtual machines, thereby saying fu** you to the ransomware, and bring up fresh instances (servers).

Of course City of Ballmer is going to be in the IT Stone Age relative to what's out there now. That's why they got hit.

I'm studying all of this Amazon Web Services stuff and what you can do with security and availability on the cloud is just amazing.
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Re: Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by dualstow » Thu Jul 11, 2019 1:15 pm

Good answers. Thanks, guys.

Yes, I’ve seen most of S1 of Mr Robot. O0 I’d forgotten about that. Should get back into it.
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Re: Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by WiseOne » Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:29 am

I imagine they are very well hardened compared to places that run on shoestring budgets, are overburdened administratively, and employ minimally competent people for low wages: hospitals/medical centers, universities, city governments - and a range of institutions that do hold some of our $$.

Which category would you put Treasury Direct in? Are they on the hardened brokerage side, or the shoestring-budget/bastion of incompetence government side?

Also there's the credit reporting bureaus...obviously they've already shown us that they have major security flaws. My assumption is that for every breach that is made public, there are probably 10 others that you don't know about. I guess they don't manage large amounts of money, so I assume their level of function is more similar to a hospital than to Fidelity. Then there's Perth Mint, who had a breach because they outsourced their website & security to a third party.

It is a consideration when picking places to put your money. I'm still not sure about Perth Mint, except that if my gold holdings ever get large enough I'd switch to the regular Depository service (which is entirely in house and managed on a computer with no outside connections) without hesitation.
Last edited by sophie on Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Do Brokerage Houses Get Hit With Ransomware?

Post by dualstow » Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:37 am

TreasuryDirect, that’s an excellent question, Soph. I hope they’re as good at locking out hackers as they are at locking out clients. O0

Vanguard has a lot of “backroom” problems- the website, accounting (errors on my friend’s tax form, and he only has three holdings). I don’t doubt that staff feel overwhelmed by customers these days, but I hope they give more attention to security than to these aforementioned glitches.
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