Treasury Department's FinCEN Unit Recovering From "Cyberjacked" E-Mail System

By Andrew Cochran

We were the first site to report the "cyberjacking" last Friday of the subscriber-based e-mail service used by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which administers the Bank Secrecy Act (as amended by the USA PATRIOT Act) and shares financial intelligence gathered from financial institutions with law enforcement and the intel community. Yesterday, FinCEN issued an update which further explained the steps that they are taking to rebuild their systems. The release also states that, "Since FinCEN did not collect personal information from subscribers to this service, no information, other than e-mail addresses, was compromised." Considering that numerous senior compliance officials at major financial institutions subscribed to the service, I will be looking for any news of spamming or identity theft involving the stolen e-mail addresses, as well as the results of the criminal investigation into the cyberjacking.

The most important impact of the cyberjacking has been to shut down the automated system whereby FinCEN and law enforcement request and receive information from financial institutions for use in terrorism and money laundering cases.

The system, enacted under section 314(a) of the PATRIOT Act, took several years and numerous hiccups to implement, but it's operated quite smoothly for over a year. Starting in March, FinCEN posted 314(a) requests for information on a secure website for review and response by over 24,000 financial institutions. FinCEN periodically issues results of the 314(a) requests, with the most recent out on September 13 (I had posted discussions of 314(a) request reports earlier this year here and here). According to this report, the requests for information issued since the 314(a) request system began in February 2003 have resulted 157 cases involving terrorism or terrorist financing and 272 cases involving money laundering. The results of the cases thus far are, quoting from the September 13 report:

1091 Grand Jury Subpoenas
13 Search Warrants
154 Administrative Subpoenas/Summons/Other
77 Arrests
72 Indictments
10 Convictions

$14,405,053.64 Total Dollar Amount Located

In my opinion, that's a good track record which merits a "congrats" to FinCEN, law enforcement, and the participating financial institutions. Although there was no compromise in the 314(a) system itself, FinCEN was wise to shut it down while they run security tests. They plan to transmit 314(a) requests in another manner until they can restore the automated system.

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