The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal agency that charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks, has emphasized on the increase in the use of digital currencies by criminals for extortion purposes.

In the recently released Semiannual Risk Perspective, the OCC said:

“Banks and other businesses continue to receive extortion demands to be paid in virtual currency in exchange for preventing or stopping distributed denial of service attacks or for the decrypting or return of proprietary information”.

The report further said that cyber criminals are increasingly targeting businesses, including banks and their customers, using social engineering attacks on bank employees that request expedited wire transfers to pay phony vendor invoices. In particular, cyber attacks target companies that provide cybersecurity risk-mitigation products and services to banks, potentially increasing the range of affected institutions through a common access point.

It further noted that there has been an increase in the number of reported critical vulnerabilities in widely used technology, such as open-source software, in the past few years. The vulnerabilities thus arising are difficult to remediate because of the potential effect on significant numbers of third-party and internally developed applications, systems, and services.

“New platforms and technologies, such as virtual currencies, enable anonymity for cyber criminals, including terrorists and other groups seeking to transfer and launder money globally. These methods not only pose substantial challenges for compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and AntiMoney Laundering (BSA/AML) laws and regulations, but also help cyber criminals raise funds to pay for physical and cyber attacks”, it added.