Exclusive: Meet the Secret Fed Cybersecurity Unit Keeping Trillions of Dollars Safe From Hackers

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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/04/28/exclusive_meet_the_secret_fed_cyber_security_unit_keeping_trillions_of_dollars_s

By Shane Harris
Foreign Policy
April 28, 2014

If the U.S. central banking system is ever hit with a crippling cyber 
attack, a group of roughly 100 government employees working in a 
three-story fortress-like building next door to a Buick dealership in East 
Rutherford, N.J., will be among the first to know about it. That's where, 
almost entirely out of sight, a team from the Federal Reserve System's 
crack cyber security unit is constantly on watch for malicious hackers, 
criminals, and spies trying to breach the computer networks of the Fed, 
its regional banks, and some of the most critical financial infrastructure 
in America.

The National Incident Response Team, or NIRT, as the group is called 
(pronounced "nert") tries to prevent intruders from breaking into Fed 
computer networks and money transfer systems used by thousands of banks 
across the U.S every day. Among the team's most important protectees is 
the Fedwire Funds Service, a real-time settlement system that banks use to 
transfer money between accounts. In 2013, Fedwire handled on average $2.8 
trillion in transfers every day.

For several years now, current and former U.S. officials, as well as bank 
executives, have warned that cyber attackers could sow mass panic by 
disrupting critical financial networks such as the ones NIRT protects, 
causing the systems to crash or manipulating information so that customers 
didn't know how much money was in their accounts and financial 
institutions couldn't square their ledgers. The nightmare scenario for 
NIRT members is a malicious hacker gaining access to Fedwire or to 
sensitive computers used by the Treasury Department, such as the 
International Treasury System, which the federal government uses to make 
payments directly to foreign individuals and companies around the world 
and is also monitored by the NIRT.

The cyber security team is the first line of defense for the central 
banking system. "If there's a breach of Fedwire or another critical 
system, they're going to wake the [Federal Reserve] chairman up out of 
bed," said one former NIRT member. "That's a shit-your-pants type of 
emergency. Anything that compromises the faith and trust in the 
[government-backed] money system. And that's all bound to the Fed and 
Treasury systems."

[...]



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