A number of US banks, including JPMorgan Chase and at least four others, were struck by hackers in a series of coordinated attacks this month, four people briefed on a continuing investigation into the crimes said.
The hackers infiltrated the banks’ networks, siphoning off gigabytes of data, including checking and savings account information, in what security experts described as a sophisticated cyberattack.
The motivation and origin of the attacks are not yet clear, investigators said. The FBI is involved in the investigation, and in the past few weeks a number of security firms have been brought in to conduct forensic studies of the penetrated computer networks.
According to two other people briefed on the matter, hackers infiltrated the computer networks of some banks and stole checking and savings account information from clients. It was not clear whether the attacks were financially motivated, or the aim was to collect intelligence as part of an espionage effort.
JPMorgan has not seen any increased fraud levels, one person familiar with the situation said.
“Companies of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day,” JPMorgan spokeswoman Patricia Wexler said. “We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels.”
FBI spokesman Joshua Campbell said the FBI was working with the US Secret Service to assess the full scope of the attacks.
“Combating cyberthreats and criminals remains a top priority for the United States government,” he said.
The intrusions were first reported by Bloomberg, which indicated that they were the work of Russian hackers. However, security experts and US government officials said they had not yet come to that conclusion.
Earlier this year a security firm in Dallas, iSight Partners, said that companies should be prepared for cyberattacks from Russia in retaliation for Western economic sanctions.
However, the head of threat intelligence at CrowdStrike Adam Meyers said it would be “premature” to suggest the attacks were motivated by sanctions.
Russian hackers began a month-long cyberattack on Estonia in 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation, after Estonian government workers moved a Soviet-era war memorial from the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
Security experts said that the stealth of the recent attacks suggests that their motivation was not political.
The US banking sector has been a frequent target for hackers in recent years, with the vast majority of attacks motivated by theft.
However, over the past two years, banks have been targeted in a series of politically motivated attacks from Iran, in which a group of Iranian hackers flooded US banking Web sites with so much online traffic — a method called a distributed denial of service attack — that the Web sites slowed or intermittently collapsed.
Unlike the cyberattacks traced to Iran, the recent attacks against US banks were not intended to disrupt the banks’ services but looked to be part of a financial or intelligence-gathering effort, three people briefed on the investigations said.
Because JPMorgan had not seen any unusual incidences of fraud it was too early to conclude that the attacks were purely financially motivated, the bank said.
Analysts said they could not yet determine whether the attacks over the past few weeks were the work of Russians or whether they were politically motivated.
Meyers said any such conclusions at this point would be the result of what he said was an effort by security firms to be the first to present conclusive evidence.
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