Bank hacking: is it on the rise?

At the end of August, bank hacker Ehud Tenenbaum was photographed leaving court, having pleaded guilty to a single count of bank-card fraud. Tenenbaum, who is Iraeli by birth, had been arrested in Canada last year for allegedly stealing roughly $1.5 million in a bank hacking scheme. But before Canadian authorities could prosecute him, he was extradited back to the United States. Now he pleads guilty to having played a major role in a sophisticated computer-hacking scheme that officials believe scored $10 million from US banks.

However, Tenenbaum actually first made headlines a decade ago when he was arrested at the age of 19. Using the hacker handle "The Analyzer", Tenenbaum was arrested with several other Israelis and two California teens in one of the first high-profile hacker cases that made international news.

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Worryingly, news of The Analyzer's arrest last month only scratches the surface of the level of computer-hacking schemes across the US in recent years, sparking real concern over the state of financial services security in protecting both its assets and its customers.

In January, for instance, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, experts warned how the threat of cybercrime is rising sharply, fuelling demand for a new system to tackle well organized gangs of cybercriminals. In fact, reports from the Forum suggest that online theft alone costs somewhere in the region of $1 trillion a year, with the number of attacks far outpacing the number of people and businesses who understand how to properly protect themselves.

So what's next? Well, while congress battle to stabilize the already vulnerable economy and put in place new regulations to restore consumer confidence and tighten security, we gather some of the biggest hacker cases that have rocked the US financial system over the last few years. These  highlight just what levels of damage can be reached should the government fail to increase security against highly organised cybercriminals.

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