Which is a greater financial cyber threat: North Korea or the National Security Agency? The answer should be obvious – but it’s not.

Last month brought news of several new hack attacks on banks and financial institutions.

Someone impersonating the New York Federal Reserve Bank stole $81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh.

Reports also revealed hackers exploited the Swift global payments network to compromise banks in the Philippines and Vietnam.

That’s not all.

Reuters learned via Freedom of Information Act requests that the Federal Reserve’s cybersecurity team detected more than 50 breaches between 2011 and 2015. Internal memos used the word “espionage” to describe several incidents.

The Fed redacted most details from the reports, so we know little else.

Did the attacks take any money or important information? The Fed won’t say. And the reports Reuters obtained covered only the Board of Governors, not the 12 privately owned regional Fed banks.

Experts point fingers at the North Korean, Chinese, and Iranian governments as well as criminal hacking groups. Those are all plausible suspects – but so is our own National Security Agency.

The NSA has experience in economic espionage.

Reports obtained by WikiLeaks last year showed that in 2012 the NSA targeted French private companies, looking particularly for details on their financing arrangements.

We also know the NSA had keen interest in Brazil, intercepting communications from the state-owned Petrobras oil company as well as the country’s central bank and finance ministry.

And according to Edward Snowden, U.S. agencies routinely collected secret banking information in Switzerland and Germany. Snowden himself worked for the CIA in Geneva.

What did the NSA do with all this information? We don’t know. But given how dependent it is on private contractors, we can easily imagine some of it leaking to U.S. companies.

Some people on the inside see this is a big problem. President Obama’s own hand-picked NSA review panel told him in 2014 that the government shouldn’t ”manipulate the financial system.” 

That should have been a bombshell revelation. Why would the panel say such a thing unless it saw the government already manipulating the financial system, or at least planning to?

We don’t know. President Barack Obama completely ignored the recommendation. The media, never much interested in the first place, quickly moved on to other subjects.

What we do know suggests a secret global financial cyberwar is already underway, with our money and private data as the ammunition.

Ammunition is expendable. To the generals in this war, so are we.

Patrick Watson is an Austin-based financial writer. Follow him on Twitter @PatrickW

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