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Tech News June 2024

U.S. Bank announces partnership with Greenlight to provide family app

Article by Frank Gargano

U.S. Bank in Minneapolis has partnered with the Atlanta-based family finance fintech Greenlight Financial Technology to help customers teach their children healthy spending habits. Consumers with the $684 billion-asset bank that have eligible U.S. Bank checking accounts can gain free access to Greenlight’s platform and linked debit cards for children and teenagers up to 17 years old. The collaboration is the latest product tied to the launch of the institution’s Bank Smartly accounts and rewards program in November 2022.

“Families were looking for a better way to raise financially smart kids [and] we found that age-appropriate financial literacy, paired with a debit card to put the skills into practice, is a powerful way to meet that need,” said Jennifer Miller, head of strategic alliances and campus banking at U.S. Bank. “Greenlight has revolutionized how parents teach their kids and teens about money, and we wanted to bring that to our customers in a simple and seamless experience.”

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What are the tech solutions to Zelle fraud and scam resolution?

Article by Penny Crosman

As Zelle fraud and scam victims tell their stories of losing large sums of money and Congress continues to hold hearings on this topic, it seems clear banks need to step up fraud detection, fraud investigations and dispute resolution.

Some of this will take human effort — for instance, better training of human fraud investigators and customer service reps. But technology that detects, flags and reports on fraud and generative AI that gathers customer and account history data could help humans investigate and handle customer fraud claims more smoothly.

Banks have long used traditional forms of AI, such as machine learning, to find unusual transaction patterns that indicate fraud. The use of generative AI to research claims is in the early stages.

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Hackers claim they stole Federal Reserve data, offer no evidence

Article by Carter Pape

In a post on its victim-shaming site, ransomware group LockBit claimed on the evening of June 23 that it had stolen 33 terabytes of data belonging to the Federal Reserve, and the group threatened a June 25 evening release time. The Fed has not commented on the matter.

Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Emsisoft, said it was “highly likely, in my opinion” that the group is lying. “I believe it’s far more likely that any data they do have relating to the [Fed] would have come from a third party,” he said.

Breaches of third-party IT services have become a common method for ransomware actors to steal data. In a prominent recent example, threat actor UNC5537 stole data from multiple organizations by breaching databases stored by cloud storage provider Snowflake. According to Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant, it and Snowflake have notified “approximately 165 potentially exposed organizations” about the breaches. Among those companies are Santander Bank, QuoteWizard and Ticketmaster.

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Truist suffers data breach, hackers claim it affects 65,000 employees

Article by Carter Pape

On June 14, Truist acknowledged an October data breach that, according to a threat actor advertising the stolen data on a forum, includes data on 65,000 employees.

“In October 2023, we experienced a cybersecurity incident that was quickly contained,” a spokesperson for Truist said. “In partnership with outside security consultants, we conducted a thorough investigation, took additional measures to secure our systems, and notified a small number of clients last fall.”

The spokesperson did not say who was behind the breach, how it occurred nor whether the thieves demanded a ransom payment. The Truist spokesperson did not acknowledge the threat actor’s claim of having source code or employee data, except to say that the bank was “providing awareness to teammates.”

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