Hackers successfully attacked the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, redirecting users of its online research services to fake websites set up by the attackers, the bank said on Tuesday.
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The fake websites were designed to look like the web pages of services provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The attack compromised the Internet’s routing system, known as the domain name system (DNS).
“As is common with these kinds of DNS attacks, users who were redirected to one of these phony websites may have been unknowingly exposed to vulnerabilities that the hackers may have put there, such as phishing, malware and access to user names and passwords,” the agency said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis told the New York Times that she did not yet know who was behind the attacks.
The bank’s website itself was not compromised, the bank said. Essentially, hackers were targeting not the site, but its users, security experts explained.
“Unless hackers were really into some serious economic research, the likely target of this attack was not the [bank’s] data, but rather the users of this data,” said Igor Baikalov, chief scientist at cyber threat data firm Securonix, in a statement.
Full article: US Federal Reserve Bank Hit by Hackers (Sputnik News)
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