New Threat

“We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mail; we know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets,” Obama said in his State of the Union speech. “Now our enemies are also seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air- traffic-control systems.”

MasterCard Inc., the second-biggest U.S. payments processor, said in its Feb. 14 annual filing the firm routinely receives threats, “and our technologies, systems and networks have been subject to cyber attacks.” So far, the impact hasn’t been material, according to the Purchase, New York-based firm.

U.S. Bancorp, ranked fifth by deposits among commercial banks, told regulators Feb. 22 it had been targeted, and that it might not be able to stop all attackers “because the techniques used change frequently or are not recognized until launched, and because security attacks can originate from a wide variety of sources.” The Minneapolis-based lender cited organized crime, terrorists and hostile foreign governments, and said risks increase as it adds more Internet and mobile-banking options.

Testing Defenses

Wells Fargo, the biggest U.S. home lender, reiterated in its Feb. 27 filing that attacks against banks may be meant to “test their cyber security in advance of future and more advanced cyber attacks,” and said preventing or cleaning up after intrusions may get expensive for the San Francisco-based firm. It didn’t specify the cost.

Bank of America, whose customers complained that websites run by the Charlotte, N.C.-based company were repeatedly slowed or knocked offline, previously acknowledged it had faced a series of denial-of-service attacks and may be required to spend significant amounts to address future attacks.

‘Frightening Number’

Non-U.S. companies also felt the impact. HSBC Finance Corp., the Illinois-based unit of Europe’s largest bank by market value, HSBC Holdings Plc, said in today’s regulatory filing it faced several denial-of-service attacks last year across Latin America, Asia and North America. Royal Bank of Canada’s CEO Gordon Nixon told shareholders last week the number of attacks faced daily by his Toronto-based company is “frightening.”

“The good news is they don’t get through the firewalls and our various protective measures have served us extremely well,” Nixon said at the bank’s Feb. 28 annual meeting.