This academic article I chose to write about is called, “Does bank’s financial standing influence the risk of a cyberattack?” by Lukas Kurowski and Pawel Smaga. Before beginning this article, I wanted to offer a guess as to what the content of the article was going to be, based on the title. There are two routes here. First, this article shows that wealthier banks that handle more money are cyberattacked more often. Second, this article shows that smaller, local banks are cyberattacked more often because they are going to be less wealthy and therefore less secure.

This article was trying to find the link between bank size and frequency of cyberattack. Based on the data provided, there is a direct link between the size of the bank and the frequency of cyberattacks it must deal with. This article quoted the NIST framework as part of their goal for writing the paper. Specifically, they wanted to help “Identify” issues and possible trends by looking at the evidence they could find.
Information about cyberattacks on banks is scarce simply because banks cannot function without the trust of the people, and knowing a cyberattack has hit your bank is an effective way to lose the trust of your customers. Many of the banks that these researchers were able to get data on therefore, were larger corporate banks that are required to disclose these types of breaches. The data still shows some interesting insights. Corporate banks were more likely to be attacked, not just to extract money or data, but also to disrupt their services. Smaller banks were much more likely to be hit specifically by an attack designed to extricate data or money.

This article also described the types of data they gathered and how they gathered it. I was hoping it would involve a honeypot type of experiment, but sadly that is very hard to do unless you can set up a convincing enough fake digital bank or get access to actual banks systems and let criminals in, which is obviously not ideal. The researchers ended up mostly using archival research and going over publicly available data and drawing conclusions from that. As stated before, many banks and financial institutions do not want to disclose when a cyberattack happens to them, and so the researchers did make a caveat that all the data they had was not every cyberattack that had happened.

A fascinating way this article links back to our class is through the lens of how a current political event can directly impact the frequency of financial cyber-attacks. For example, financial cyberattacks apparently remained stable in terms of their frequency, until 2023 when the Russian War of Aggression against Ukraine really kicked off and the frequency of cyberattacks on worldwide banking institutions skyrocketed. When real world events and cybersecurity merge, the results can apparently be informative and disastrous. This is not necessarily involving a marginalized group unless you consider Ukrainians marginalized. However, the data does clearly show an increase in attacks on U.S. Institutions both Russian and Ukrainian, criminal and hacktivist. That opens some fascinating research possibilities. The Russian attacks are self-explanatory but the Ukrainian attacks? I would like to know the percentage of Ukrainian attacks that were criminal versus hacktivist. Did the war make more people turn to crime to survive, or were hacktivist groups in Ukraine upset with us because of our lackluster support?

In class, we reviewed how different types of hackers exist in the modern world. Criminal hackers and hacktivists are both a hacker subtype that this article involved. Apparently two-thirds of hacks were perpetrated by actual criminals, and the remaining one-third was by hacktivists. Criminal motivations appeared to be similar across the board… money. Hacktivists’ motivations had absolutely had almost no clear trend and varied wildly from group to group. I say almost because one social and political aspect stood out to me. Every hacktivist first chose a country whose values did not line up with theirs and then chose a target in that country. The psychological profiles of these hacktivists fascinate me. I hope we get more studies on why hacktivists do what they do compared to criminals. This article sadly did not go into each group’s psychological profiles for their motivations but viewed through the lens of this class I am sure we can draw some conclusions.

I wonder if this study can promote the idea of having more diversity in the tech world.
Seeing how a large group of these cyberattacks come from India I am curious to know if we had more Indian minority diversity in higher positions at these companies if it would prevent as slice of the hacktivist attacks that come from India. Would seeing someone from the same race as you leading that company make you less likely to try and disrupt their operations? Also, would there be data to show that if a woman led the company versus a man that the company would be less likely to suffer a cyber-attack? Or would that make it more likely because of misogyny? Fascinating questions that sadly do not have answers yet.

The researchers in this study were able to use this date to make clear that larger, wealthier financial institutions are under more frequent cyberattacks, as well as deciding a few categorization types for financial cyberattacks. For example, globally in the U.S. the earlier statistic is the truth. However, if you only take the data specifically from the U.S.? Smaller banks were more likely to experience cyberattacks. This is a fascinating data point. Why specifically is the U.S. an outlier when viewed on its own like this? Do we have many smaller banks due to our countries’ size, and therefore the statistics are skewed? Or maybe our larger financial institutions do not have to report cyber-attacks and take responsibility for a breach the way a U.K. bank would? The more that this article answers, the more follow up questions I have.