The Establishment of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force

Bankinfosecurity.com's article outlines the comments made by the Attorney Generals Office:

"That the nation faces unprecedented challenges in responding to the financial crisis that has gripped the economy for the past year. Mortgage, securities and corporate fraud schemes have eroded the public's confidence in the nation's financial markets and have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street."

Recently in the Brazilian Power outage events, even an implied weakness in the controls of Critical Infrastructure could be used to destabilize the financial stability in markets, subverting the controls that are involved in financial trading. There have been conflicting reports about whether the attack was caused by an attack on the controls of its Dam's systems. Employees and Contractors of the system complained that their pay checks and statements had been modified to include a message from the attackers.

With all of this talk on financial fraud and critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, I could not help but be reminded of the 1983 movie Superman III where Robert Vaughn's character sites "Computers rule the world today and the fellow that rules the computer, rules the world." and Richard Pryor hacking into secret defense systems to ruin the coffee crop for the next 5 years, Superman III: Tornado Scene.

While it all may seem very tongue and cheek and some what unrealistic, the simultaneous collapse of the financial markets due to fraudulent transactions combined with the failure of major Scada Systems would have a serious effect on a nation's stability. In 2002 the U.S. Naval War College conducted a study that concluded it would probably take about 5 years to plan and cost about 290 million dollars to plan a significant electronic attack.

Digital Stenography: The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves.

Infosectoday's article: Digital Steganography Threat or Hype: by James E. Wingate - Summary:
Use of steganography will never be detected if no one ever looks for it.