Bank Of America Essay

Introduction

Bank of America is currently one of the biggest banks in America. The bank was founded in 1904 in under the name Bank of Italy and continued to expand and merge into the Bank of America behemoth (Nolen, 2008). As of 2016, Bank of America has approximately 15,900 ATMs and serves 46 million consumer and small business relationships (Bank of America, 2016). Bank of America handles millions and millions of dollars daily in America and internationally. And so as large player in the banking industry protecting consumers and investments is paramount. Any system connected to Bank of America must be secured from determined hackers or the company will face huge monetary losses and their reputation will be damaged. Having a known exposure

At the time, XP had the largest market share of business software systems and was used for numerous industries retail, healthcare, the government, and big banks. While systems still running on Windows XP would continue to function, Microsoft would no longer send over security patches for viruses or malware leaving any machine vulnerable to attacks. Even given a seven-year period to plan for upgrading their ATMs many banks had not installed or upgraded new software on the ATM machines. Though the Microsoft change was important to overall security of many banks, however as project, it was reprioritized due to the near financial market collapse in late 2007 and 2008. During the financial crisis, Bank of America purchased both Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch bringing costs from bad the assets as well as a multitude of state and federal lawsuits because of the purchases (Nolen, 2008). After surviving the market crisis and settling lawsuits, the banking industry’s primary priority was complying with new banking regulation, the “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”. Due to these events when the Microsoft XP 2014 deadline was nearing Bank of America had asked for a support extension (CNBC,