It doesn’t take a techie to abuse an IT system from the inside, and inside attackers do not fit any common profile. Those are among the findings of the Secret Service and the CERT Coordination Center in a study of insider attacks against financial organizations. Damage to the victimized institutions ranged from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The report, Illicit Cyber Activity in the Banking and Finance Sector, is the first in a series of Insider Threat Studies in critical infrastructure sectors.

The report was funded by the Homeland Security Department and conducted by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and the CERT/CC of Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.

By William Jackson at GCN.

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