When a cyber attack disrupted the operations of the largest bank in the world with the U.S. Treasury, an unusual workaround had to be implemented: this workaround consisted of a USB stick and a courier.
How did this happen? The U.S. subsidiary of the Commerce Bank of China – the largest bank in the world by total assets – was targeted by a cyber attack on the night of Thursday, November 9, 2023. Lockbit is suspected, a group that has already hacked Boeing and the Royal Mail, the national postal service of England.
Due to the attack, the bank was unable to process significant portions of the U.S. Treasury’s operations, as Bloomberg (Paywall) reports. In order to get the transactions done, a workaround was necessary – and it sounds like something out of a movie.
Didn’t this happen in a movie?
What did this workaround look like? The makeshift solution consisted of a USB stick that was sent through the Manhattan neighborhood by a courier to deliver the necessary data for a settlement to the parties involved in the trade.
Meanwhile, the bank was trying to minimize the damage and fix the infected systems. By Friday, operations could resume as usual in the boring way.
Unfortunately, too many details about the courier’s trip are not known, as Bloomberg focused its reporting primarily on the background of the hack and the impact on the market.
Did the courier at least feel a tiny bit like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the action film Premium Rush from 2012? In that film, Gordon-Levitt plays an adrenaline junkie and bike courier who has to transport a time-sensitive letter across New York City while being pursued by all sorts of shady characters.
It’s also about a USB stick and a lot of money in the case of German programmer Stefan Thomas, who possesses Bitcoins worth around 222 million euros on an encrypted storage device – if only he could remember the damn password:
