Finance

Financial sanctions imposed on Russia since its 2014 seizure of Crimea have hit President Vladimir Putin and his cronies where it hurts most—in the wallet. The most recent actions will freeze the U.S.-based assets of certain top Russian officials, arms dealers, and oligarchs in Putin’s orbit, as well as banning ...

The numbers are staggering, yet only the tip of the iceberg. More than 145 million American citizens are affected by the Equifax data breach disclosed last month; that’s more than half of the American adult population. At the same time, this is only the latest in a series of cyber ...

At the RSA conference in February, Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer called for a "digital Geneva Convention" to help provide parameters on offensive cyber operations and address a rapidly growing area of concern for many organizations. This followed on the heels of the release of the second iteration of the Tallinn ...

As more and more business is conducted online and cyber criminals target in on a very lucrative market, both the public and private sector face increasing cybersecurity risks.  The Cipher Brief sat down with Scott Keoseyan, the leader for Deloitte’s Cyber Threat Analysis and Research Teams, and Keith Brogan, a ...

Observers around the world were shocked when news broke about a major bank heist in Bangladesh. This was no ordinary robbery though – this time, the thieves stole tens of millions of dollars by exploiting a flaw in the SWIFT network—an internationally recognized code for banks. The cyber-oriented nature of ...

Cyber threats pose a challenge to banks and firms operating in the financial sector, primarily due to the fact that “vulnerability really exists everywhere,” both on the technological side and the business side, says Michael Orozco, Managing Director in Accenture Strategy Security. To help improve security in the financial sector, ...

The Cipher Brief sat down with Steven Grossman, VP of Strategy and Enablement at Bay Dynamics, to discuss the current cyber threat landscape facing the financial sector. According to Grossman, insider threats pose the greatest risk to the global banking industry and that “being able to track, manage, and understand ...

As the military campaign to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIS continues to dominate U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, there is also an effort to disrupt and eliminate the terrorist group’s financial capacity. Terrorist financing networks are complex and intricate. Groups pull together funds from a variety of sources ...

The Somalia based terror group al-Shabaab has “diversified its economy” to ensure a constant income, from kidnapping for ransom and confiscating food and aid sent to rural populations, to forcing households to have expatriate family members send remittances from abroad to al-Shabaab’s coffers.  Some of the group’s most notable financial ...

For decades, belligerent groups have financed their operations by tapping into a variety of locally available economies, including illegal ones. The Shining Path in Peru was among the first groups to tax drug cultivation and smuggling. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia prolonged its life by being heavily involved in logging. ...

In mid-October, the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea published its latest report confirming that despite years of effort and the recent territorial gains that AMISOM (the African Union’s mission in Somalia) and the Somali government have made against al-Shabaab, the group continues to garner the finances it needs ...