Treasury opens cyber threat sharing

A crypto exchange can lose money in minutes, but the warning signs often show up earlier in other places. On April 9, the U.S. Treasury said eligible digital-asset firms will now get the same cyber threat information it already shares with banks and other traditional financial institutions, and it will do that at no cost. (compliancealliance.com) The office running it is Treasury’s Office of Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection. Treasury said the goal is to give firms timely, actionable information they can use to identify, prevent, and respond to attacks on customer accounts and internal networks. (compliancealliance.com) That is a shift in who gets treated like core financial plumbing. Treasury’s Luke Pettit said digital-asset firms are now “an increasingly important part of the U.S. financial sector,” which is why their resilience is being tied to the health of the broader system. (compliancealliance.com) The backdrop is a run of very large crypto thefts. On February 26, 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said North Korea was responsible for stealing about $1.5 billion in virtual assets from Bybit on February 21, 2025, and said the hackers quickly spread the funds across thousands of blockchain addresses. (fbi.gov) That kind of attack is hard to stop one company at a time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s alert asked exchanges, bridges, blockchain analytics firms, decentralized finance services, and other virtual-asset providers to block transactions tied to the laundering effort, which only works if many firms are looking at the same indicators quickly. (fbi.gov) Treasury is plugging crypto companies into a model finance has used for years. Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the main cyber-sharing group for finance, says it serves about 5,000 member firms across 75 countries and focuses on real-time visibility, response, and systemic risk reduction. (fsisac.com) The policy trail was already pointing this way. Treasury said the new program advances a recommendation from the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets report, and Treasury officials also tied it to the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, which they said calls for responsible innovation built on cybersecurity and operational resilience. (compliancealliance.com) Congress and regulators have been widening the frame from fraud to infrastructure. In March 2026, the American Bankers Association noted that Treasury had also published a report on technologies financial institutions use to counter illicit finance involving digital assets, alongside its latest national risk assessments. (bankingjournal.aba.com) The practical change is simple: a crypto firm that qualifies can now get the same warnings a bank might get about a malware campaign, a phishing cluster, or a hostile actor’s playbook. Treasury’s Cory Wilson said attacks on digital-asset platforms are growing in both frequency and sophistication, so the point is faster defense, not slower cleanup. (compliancealliance.com) That pushes cyber spending closer to the center of crypto operations. If Treasury is treating exchanges, custodians, and industry groups more like regulated financial infrastructure, then hiring security teams, vetting vendors, and wiring up incident response start to look less like optional overhead and more like the price of staying in the system. (nextgov.com)