Same group who claimed to have Fulton County, Georgia data, pushed back the pay deadlines, but never released anything after Fulton County didn't pay the ransom. I don't doubt they have actually hit targets but that seed of doubt is planted.
Is that some calculus about risks? Ransoming data with a threat, might kind of make people shrug in the aftermath. Airing all of the dirty laundry might make authorities take a significantly harder look at you. Like those groups who apologize for hacking a hospital.
What data does the Fed actually deal with? The article mentions "Americans' banking secrets" as if the risk is to individuals but ... to oversee banks, does it need the particulars of individual account holders? Or is this information about banks and their overnight borrowing (i.e. should be "American banks' secrets")? Or is this like, pending drafts of various policy reports and granular data from which summaries would eventually be published?
Does it process individual transactions? RTGS stands for Real Time Gross Settlement, and my understanding is that it lets banks settle the total amount of processed transactions, thus leaving out any details of particular transactions.
For important/large payments, banks will often let customers allow do do individual transactions on the RTGS.
That's how wire transfers work in the US, for example, and that's one reason why they're more expensive than ACH: Without netting, transfers actually reduce reserves, and by extension liquidity, from the sending bank in real time.
FedACH in particular is a retail payment service, and the operator would have visibility into individual transactions, I believe.
> that's one reason why they're more expensive than ACH
The Fed charges between 4 and 19¢ for a wire [1]. For the delta to be explained by the cost of warehousing reserves, we'd need to assume Zimbabwean costs of capital for the big banks.
RTGS is fundamentally more expensive than net settling. But wires are expensive because we're getting hosed. (If you wire frequently, there are banks that won't charge you for it, e.g. Fidelity.)
Completely agree: Of course the markup that banks charge for them is not proportional in any way.
If it were, FedNow (which is also real-time, although I'm not sure on whether it's also real-time settled) and non-US equivalents would be equally expensive, yet SEPA instant and FPS are usually free to consumers. They do have an amount cap per day, though.
This is related to fraud risk, which is only ameliorated by net-settlement systems in that they're slower. (An RTGS with a built-in delay would have a similar fraud profile.)
Wires' immutability makes them both ideal for large transactions and more risky for fraud. If I understand correctly, FedNow payments are reversible.
In essence, you have to pick two among fast settlement, immutability and low cost. FedWire is fast and immutable and low cost at volume. FedNow is fast and low cost. ACH is stupid.
It helps with fraud, sure, but I bet banks aren't too unhappy about the dampening effect it has on liquidity flows as well, especially now that we've left ZIRP?
There must be some cost of capital associated with needing reserve buffers for outgoing instant payments sent outside of the operating hours of the interbank money market and the Fed discount window.
In the end, both effects (cost of fraud and cost of liquidity) will of course get baked into the cost per dollar to the banks and it might be hard to untangle them.
> banks aren't too unhappy about the dampening effect it has on liquidity flows
Correct.
The average FedWire is $5.4mm [1]. The Fed Funds rate is 5.3% [2]. ACH settles in 1 to 3 business days [3]. Actual/360, that's $800 to 2,400 to finance wholesale.
If, on the other hand, you're JPMorgan and can pay 2 bps for deposits [4], that cost drops to $3 to 9. These are the economics that drive bank consolidation.
Just regular "SEPA slow" (i.e. SEPA credit transfer), as far as I know, unless they're financed by a mortgage/loan anyway.
Some banks offer "rush payments" for that use case in particular, which I believe essentially correspond to either an RTGS payment and a phone call or fax to the receiving bank ("hey, can you check your TARGET2 account real quick for our transfer <reference> and credit your account x for the sum please?"), or just a regular old SEPA credit transfer with somebody making sure that it's not caught in some AML or fraud control queue for several days. It's not a pan-European standardized scheme, in any case.
> lets banks settle the total amount of processed transactions, thus leaving out any details of particular transactions
This is the definition of a Net settlement scheme (multiple transactions are combined at end of a period, resulting in only the net changes being transferred), not a Gross settlement scheme.
FedACH is a net settled scheme, but even then, the operator of such a scheme usually has visibility into individual payments (unless participating banks settle everything bilaterally and there is no central operator/hub).
Pretty much everything in traditional banking runs either on mainframes or Windows PCs. If there's Linux servers or non-windows clients, that's usually bolted on via some sort of adapter to the mainframes.
You would anticipate a lot of confidential supervisory information: the Federal Reserve (and other Federal regulators) inspect banks regularly, and are allowed to ask for basically anything at all from them. You would expect there to be a significant volume of highly confidential stuff in the working papers. You'd also expect to see potentially embarrassing material for banks like negative supervisory findings, where banks are being asked to deal with things that potentially affect their safety and soundness. This stuff is all highly confidential, for obvious reasons.
This seems like the kind of data banks would hand over for FDIC insurance since it's on a per-account basis. I don't know if that makes its way to the federal reserve.
Looked for it. "idaho potato production 1957" to see what the right search terms were by looking at some hits, then "idaho farm report 1957" until I found that table via in-book text search; both searches as " Search text contents ", limited to <1965.
Department of Homeland Security, I imagine. Probably the IRS too. Probably not the Fed, they can't really do anything with the data other than report it to someone else.
> Many experts are skeptical about the criminal group’s announcement. The Federal Reserve is a high-profile target, and a data breach could have serious repercussions. Many believe that the group’s announcement is just for attention.
The use of "many" in such contexts by journalists (and human/AI entities who choose to write like journalists, as in this case) is a shim used to make personal opinion seem more objective.
And we can definitely rely on plurality of professionals.
There were many (almost all) journalists and intelligence professionals that claimed the Hunter Laptop was not real… except of course it was and entered into evidence in his gun trail and conviction recently.
The "story" was that Joe Biden had pushed Ukraine to protect Hunter Biden [1], and there was no evidence found to support that claim at all, despite multiple investigations from the FBI as well as both chambers of Congress [2].
The only thing that turned out to be true and actually criminal was that Hunter Biden acquired a gun while forbidden from doing so, for which he was recently convicted.
> There was all the crack anfter Joe spent decades enforcing laws to disproportionately punish users of that drug.
Many people, on all sides of the political aisles as well as the population, supported the "war on drugs". It's not really fair to single out Joe Biden for a policy that was unquestionably popular during the time.
> And the more actionable complaints that he was selling influence to Joe while complaining about his cut.
And yet, not enough to be worthy of judgement by Republican-led committees. Of course, the question remains if the committees didn't see an issue because if they'd have held the Bidens to that standard, they'd have to resign en masse as well.
> That Joe was involved in the businesses that Hunter had zero qualifications for.
People leading businesses without being (formally) qualified to do so? If there is one thing that's a defining feature of modern capitalism, then this.
> But yea, it’s OK you aren’t aware of those things. You were by design protected from those nasty truths by “the many”. And even now, if it doesn’t say it on Wikipedia, it must not be true!
My POV is that when even a bunch of Republicans can't find more actionable (!) evidence of wrongdoing than illegally acquiring a gun and questionable policy decisions decades ago, the entire matter was blown up to a size it should never even have got to.
>Many people, on all sides of the political aisles as well as the population, supported the "war on drugs". It's not really fair to single out Joe Biden for a policy that was unquestionably popular during the time.
>> And the more actionable complaints that he was selling influence to Joe while complaining about his cut.
Right, the good old, “well there is no evidence except for the evidence that isn’t enough to convict”. These people knew exactly what they were doing and covered their tracks except for the crackhead son of course, because crackhead.
You don’t need to protect him. His being a bad person doesn’t mean his opponent is a good person.
That’s pretty disingenuous. The story was it was Hunter’s laptop, had compromising information on Hunter (it did), had emails that detailed more involvement and knowledge of Hunter’s business by Joe than was previously disclosed, as well as a litany of other private information that was not previously known (private email addresses used by public officials).
50 intelligence officials signed a politically motivated letter to cast doubt on the authenticity of any of this[0] and the majority of media outlets inferred that it not only could be misinformation, but that it was and gaslighted anyone who alleged differently. The officials opinion was wrong from the outset, and appears to have been a screen for a very politically connected family.
Could you link something showing that "almost all" journalists claimed the laptop wasn't real? Some articles from notable publications making such claims, etc.
If this is real, this is an incredible target to choose. I mean, you might not make it trial if they catch you, if you know what I mean. Makes me wonder what level of affiliation or perceived safety would make anyone this confident.
They will be Russian. All of the groups are just government agents, that’s why you get someone like “Anonymous” suddenly appearing overnight, attacking someone that is a foreign rival to the US and then disappearing for another 8 years.
> that’s why you get someone like “Anonymous” suddenly appearing overnight, attacking someone that is a foreign rival to the US and then disappearing for another 8 years
Humans can spontaneously self organise to a surprising extent. No government was behind Reddit's meme trading, for instance.
Not saying you're wrong. Just that spontaneous bursts of organisation aren't per se evidence of outside influence.
I don't think the federal reserve has that many deep dark secrets. The main risk is going to be stuff like knowing that a bank is in trouble before it's public knowledge.
If previous releases are anything to go by, it’ll be a bunch of backups and databases from enterprise HR and IT software that was running on poorly secured Windows servers, though I don’t know how it adds up to 33TB. Probably undeduplicated backup images or something.
The dump from their Boeing hack was excruciatingly boring.
One of the scary things about ransomware attacks is to think of the possibility of other actors having gotten in before and copied all the data. I can't imagine the security hole is always an unknown zero day.
I’m pretty sure every phishing attack almost ever was used in the wild and OS-agnostic.
The rest of the list was off the top of my head. Other than WannaCry and Stux, how many large scale windows malwares can you name without looking them up?
I guess you could call it social engineering, but it seems like the words Microsoft Outlook and Active Directory are way overrepresented in these attack vectors (hopefully not in this particular case.)
I'm not sure that people see it as moral, so much as boring.
We're not expecting to hear "Exclusive: The cocaine-fuelled prostitution orgy where Bernanke and Greenspan agreed to remove dress shirts from the basket of goods used to measure inflation, replacing them with streaming video services and triggering a rise in the base rate from 5.25% to 5.5%"
They're one of the most powerful, and one of the most scrutinized. Keeping them insulated from political pressure is incredibly important. Otherwise you end up with a monetary policy of "drastically cut rates right before the election to protect the incumbent".
Which is what this clown Glapiński did for PiS in Poland.
And by clown I don't exaggerate. All his off-topic rambling and "bon mots" became a meme ("jak rośnie to spada, jak spada to rośnie", "nie ma co się kopać z koniem")
This really shows how difficult it is to maintain quality of unelected officials who are supposed to be independent and can't even be dismissed.
If they are not beholden to the political incumbent, they will be beholden to a shadow org of conflicting interests. And this shadow org away from public spotlight is the problem
> "drastically cut rates right before the election to protect the incumbent".
They're not immune to political pressure. They really should be raising rates again (housing prices going up, stock market at all time highs, inflation still not under control) and aren't for exactly that reason.
I would assume the Fed thinks it's not actually an ideal time to raise rates.
Real growth is in the dirt, they have a dual mandate, and the funds rate is an indiscriminate weapon. Given the circumstances the ideal intervention would be fiscal policy aimed at reducing the supply of money in less CoL-sensitive areas but the people in charge of _that_ are uh, somewhat more susceptible to political pressure.
OP said insulated which shouldn't be conflated with immunity.
That said they operate with very little political interference in recent years which is part of why the greenback has such strength. If that were to change the USD/Economy would be in a world of pain. All of a sudden those deficits would be much more crippling as people wouldn't trust the currency.
The shit that would be heaved on both the equity and bond markets if the Fed hiked rates at this point is quite possibly Biblical. I'm not disputing that the pain is better now than later - and it may be the case here as well (I don't know, I'm a trader not an economist). My view is that rate hikes aren't really warranted at this point. Inflation is still high but many of the core measures are finally starting to show signs of improvement. The question at this point is whether the Fed can justify cutting this year or only in '25.
The other side of the coin is that if the Fed hiked now, half the country would be up in arms that the Fed basically assassinated the Biden administration. I think the Fed is not in the wrong of waiting a bit, at least until after the elections. Then if inflation starts coming off, well there's nothing for them to do, and if it doesn't, they can do it without so much fuss from politicians.
Hell, if Trump wins, he might be in the lucky position of claiming that he singlehandedly fixed everything and allowed the Fed to start cutting rates :D
