Compliance Blog

Written by Shari R. Pogach, Regulatory Paralegal 

NCUA has released its June 2015 issue of The NCUA Report.  The articles in this month’s edition include:

DDoS Attacks Increasing on Financial Institutions

Chairman’s Corner: Listening Leads to Results

Don’t Forget the Most Important Part of Your EMV Conversion: Your Members

Vice Chairman Metsger’s Perspective: Redesigning the Regulatory Highway with E-ZPass

Board Member McWatters’ Perspective: Bridging the Divide

Board Actions: Corporate Stabilization Fund’s Net Position Stays in the Black

Food and Fuel: How to Manage Lending to Two Volatile Sectors

Understanding IT Lingo

In the article on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), NCUA’s Office of National Examinations and Supervision warns credit unions that such attacks have not slowed, rather, there is data indicating the number of such attacks have increased nearly 117 percent during first quarter 2015 in comparison to first quarter 2014.  And, financial institutions accounted for almost 8.4 percent of these types of attacks.  DDoS attacks are also increasing in intensity with the average lasting more than 24.82 hours. 

DDoS attackers are using botnets or a zombie army along with crimeware toolkits to go after and overwhelm a network.  These toolkits take advantage of services allowing computers to talk to one another and are susceptible to spoofing, thus making it more difficult to locate the source of the DDoS attack or the attacker. 

Credit unions are advised to know the signs of a DDoS attack and to improve on defenses against such attacks.  Examples and resources are provided to assist with both.

Are you confused by some of the terms I’ve used in this discussion?  NCUA has also handily provided a cheat sheet on understanding the lingo to help you better understand what your IT folks are talking about when discussing DDoS attacks.