Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 9
Understanding the situational awareness in cybercrimes
IN THE UK
In November 2013 the Bank of England released a financial stability report which 
detailed a number of attacks across the UK banking sector—the report states:
Cyber attack has continued to threaten to disrupt the financial system. In the past 
six months, several UK banks and financial market infrastructures have experi-
enced cyber attacks, some of which have disrupted services.
(
Bank of England, 2013
, p. 25)
The report also accepts that the banking sector is susceptible to cyber-attacks 
as it has a “high degree of interconnectedness, its reliance on centralised market 
infrastructure and its sometimes complex legacy IT systems” (
Bank of England, 
2013
, p. 54).
The “systemic” threat to the UK banking and payments system is recognized 
in the report: “While losses have been small relative to UK banks' operational risk 
capital requirements, they have revealed vulnerabilities. If these vulnerabilities were 
exploited to disrupt services, then the cost to the financial system could be significant 
and borne by a large number of institutions” (p. 25).
The report was published as the UK banks took part in a one day cyber threat 
exercise called Operation Waking shark II which aimed to test the financial systems 
ability to withstand major cyber-attacks. These types of operations require competi-
tors across the sector to share information about the potential threats and this type of 
co-operation is not yet believed to be present.
In December 2013 Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland, UK-based banks were 
subject to a number of DDoS attacks which reportedly cost them millions in compen-
sation. The DDoS impacted on the bank's websites and directly affected the bank's 
customer's ability to use their services. Currently, there is no conclusive information 
about who was responsible for the attack or motivation for the attack. Had a notori-
ous hacking group been behind the attack they would more than likely to have laid 
claim to it (
Tadeo, 2013
).
In October 2012, a group of hacktivists did lay claim to the DDoS attack on 
HSBC which impacted millions of user's ability to access their online accounts 
around the world. Following these kinds of attacks it is commonplace to see banks 
defending customer data—usually insisting that the attacks did not compromise per-
sonal information. A hacking group who call themselves fawkes security on Twitter 
and who act in association with the “Anonymous” ideology (see section below) laid 
claim to the DDoS attack on HSBC their justification being that the banks are corrupt 
and have caused the global economic crisis. The group tweeted counter information 
suggesting that personal data were affected:
When HSBC said “user data had not been compromised” This isn't entirely cor-
rect. We also managed to log 20,000 debit card details. #OpHSBC
There is no evidence to back these claims. There is also no evidence to sug-
gest that it was related to fraudulent activity. Although DDoS attacks can be used 

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