US Federal Reserve hacked, mildly

The United States Federal Reserve has announced that one of its internal websites was hacked, though it has assured the public that no critical functions of the bank were affected and that the flaw in the system that allowed the hacker to gain access has now been shored up.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Federal spokesperson said. “Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system.”

Of course this admission comes just two days after twitter account OpLastResort, linked with hacktivist movement Anonymous, announced that it had managed to obtain the login credentials of some 4,000 US banking executives.

While it's unknown whether these two events are linked, Reuters is hinting that they could be, since the website that was hacked purportedly was designed to allow banks to contact one another in the event of a natural disaster impacting traditional lines of communication. The Federal Reserve declined to comment on the matter.

OpLastResort is a recently set up offshoot of Anonymous that aims to “help” reform US government and prosecution practices, following on from the death of activist Aaron Swartz.

KitGuru Says: It seems unlikely that the Federal Reserve would want to shake confidence in its solidarity by admitted a catastrophic failure of its security, but perhaps that's what took place. If OpLastResort did indeed get in deep enough to grab executive login details, the next few weeks could be very interesting indeed.

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