The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ widely used data and research website was hacked late last month. According to the St. Louis Fed, the regional central bank’s internal systems were not compromised.
The regional central bank issued a statement. It mentions: “On April 24, 2015, computer hackers manipulated routing settings at a domain name service vendor used by the St. Louis Fed so that they could automatically redirect some of the Bank’s web traffic that day to rogue webpages they created to simulate the look of the St. Louis Fed’s research.stlouisfed.org website.”
A section of the research website, known as Fred, collects 149,000 data sets from nearly 60 national, international, public and private sources. Because of the way the website allows for a user-friendly manipulation of comprehensive data, it is relied on by journalists, economists, and other researchers who seek a detailed resource for economic data. It is also known as a go-to resource for economic indicators, and was a popular resource during the 2013 government shutdown.
This incident is a reminder of an importance of having and following the security protocols for any type of business that collects data.
For more information, we refer you to the original source: the hack was first reported by Krebs on Security, a blog on the security industry.
How is your state of IT? Call Us: (855) 551-7760 with any questions.
