Hilltop National Bank closes Wyoming branches after cybersecurity incident

Hilltop National Bank, based in Casper, Wyoming, took its internal banking systems offline Wednesday after identifying a cybersecurity incident that disrupted online and mobile banking, telephone service and scheduled payments.

Hilltop first publicly acknowledged the disruption at 8:32 a.m. MDT Tuesday, Sept. 8. The bank said at 3:43 p.m. that interruptions to its online, mobile and telephone services were continuing.

Employees had begun noticing problems across the bank’s information technology infrastructure Tuesday, according to County17. After midnight Wednesday, Bill Salvin, a representative for Hilltop Bank and True Companies, said the bank had identified the problem as a cybersecurity incident and shut down its internal systems to isolate the network and protect data.

County17 reported that debit cards and ATM withdrawals remained available under a combined $1,000 daily limit. The limit applied to card purchases and ATM withdrawals together, rather than providing $1,000 for each. Automatic payments scheduled during the outage would not be processed.

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Last night I was talking with family members of an executive at this bank. Apparently their systems were down 2 weeks, and while they did start processing automatic payments they were "blind" for those 2 weeks, meaning they were letting people withdraw $1000/day and make payments without knowing their bank balance (they said not many people abused this).

I hear a lot about AI/quantum risks to cryptocurrency, but it seems to me the banking system has orders of magnitude greater vulnerability and risks to these threat vectors, and now we see it in real time. Are other banks being taken out by AI hackers? What is the trend? What happens if one of the big national banks suffers a comparable attack? (I was told Hilltop had just passed their cybersecurity audits with flying colors before this attack.)

I just searched for news on this incident, and this article struck me as the best general write-up on the initial details of the incident. You can search and find quite a few others, but the ones I looked at were all focused on interviewing customers and detailing their bad experiences caused by the hack. Which is nice but provided little or no information on the background and scope of the incident.

Based on some other searches South Korea's banking industry has taken some bad hits from AI attacks, which makes sense if the Norks are behind it (North Korea has put a lot of focus on developing their hacking capabilities in recent years). And another small US bank was mentioned as being hacked. Which makes sense that it might be smaller US banks that are more vulnerable to sophisticated hacking than the bigger banks. But it might be a sign of what is coming in the months ahead if the balance of power is shifting in the arms race between hackers and banks.

“AI based attack” is a very buzzy term that doesn’t really mean anything.

It could mean autonomous AI agents got loose and attacked the bank (like the HuggingFace attack). This is a truly terrifying development that the creators of agents should be held accountable for.

But more than likely it just means that an attacker used AI tools during their attack on the bank.

In a traditional attack, the bad guys would find a toehold into the network of the bank by misconfigured firewall settings or someone revealing a password or someone clicking a bad link or downloading a bad attachment. Then the bad guys would manually run hacking tools to find other toeholds (configuration issues, unpatched software, vulnerabilities, etc..) to pivot their way through the network to escalate privileges and take control.

The most basic attacks could be performed by what are derisively called “script kiddies” who don’t really know what they are doing but know how to run the pre-configured scripts to try to find exploitable “toeholds” in the network. The more sophisticated attacks could be performed by highly skilled hackers who know exactly what they are doing, have more sophisticated tools and know what the next pivot should be immediately.

This could be a very time consuming process that could potentially take hours/days/weeks and would have the potential to be detected and stopped if the appropriate monitoring and notification systems were in place.

With AI, these hacking tools can be leveraged in real time by multiple AI agents (who are all “highly skilled hackers”) and with lightning speed. This could allow the attacker to outrun the monitoring and detection put in place to stop them.

Another “AI based attack” could involve using AI to help in the social engineering of the employees. For example, the “CEO” could call a user and tell them to go to a website, enter their Windows/Microsoft credentials and download a file. But the “CEO” could be an AI clone of the CEO’s voice being used by a bad guy. From there, they would do what I described above.

At least these are some of the things the bad guys have been up to lately. It’s really just bad guys using AI to more effectively and efficiently run the same scams they have been running for years.

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