Earlier this month, several major United States banks including JP Morgan (News - Alert) Chase faced off against a series of coordinated cyberattacks launched by hackers attempting to spy on customers' personal information, including checking and saving account data and even personal identification data. The motives and origins of the sophisticated cyberattack remain a mystery, but the F.B.I. is now involved with the investigation. Already, several security firms have conducted forensic studies on the compromised computer networks.

“Companies of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day,” said JPMorgan spokeswoman Patricia Wexler. According to her, “We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels.” Unfortunately for this time, those layers of defense were all penetrated and an unknown number of perpetrators had access to sensitive personal customer information.

What this series of attacks shows is that today's digital criminals are becoming both smarter and more numerous. Security experts are having a tougher time keeping up with criminals who are coming up with new ways to bypass existing security measures every day, which means that these criminals are gaining access to more and more critical systems. If left unchecked, this could lead to several serious disasters spread through misinformation and a plummeting economy.

Bloomberg (News - Alert) was the first to report the hacking intrusions, which seems to incriminate Russian hackers for the act. While it is possible that Russians could be conducting surveillance on Americans as an act of revenge against Western economic sanctions, but the evidence to support this theory is largely circumstantial. The attacks could also have come from within the country, in a simple attempt to steal money. For the time being, we are still in the dark. The true danger of cybercrime is the associated anonymity, and those who take part in it are so difficult to track down.