We all love to be popular, but banks could forgo the increasingly sophisticated attention of cyber-criminals who are employing the latest technologies to commit cyber-theft, with the financial industry as their favourite target. Can banks do anything to protect themselves, or are they helpless victims of this new breed of bank thief? Fortunately, there are practical steps that banks—and customers—can take to strengthen their armour against cyber-security breaches.
In the recent massive ransomware attack, which threatened institutions, businesses, and organizations in 99 countries, unless victims paid the required ransom, hackers didn’t discriminate; they successfully targeted hospitals, Telco’s, government offices, and thousands of businesses with WannaCry, the breed of malware that they used to propagate the attack.
With the fourth EU Directive on Money Laundering coming into force in June this year and instances of financial crime becoming increasingly frequent, it is more crucial than ever for teams within Financial Institutions (FIs), as well as across the industry, to collaborate to tackle financial crime and fraud.
Cybersecurity is a growing risk area for all businesses at the moment. In particular, over the past year it has become glaringly obvious that there are a number of gaps in cybersecurity protection and infrastructure when it comes to the banking sector.
There’s strength in unity, it’s often been said, but for the world’s banking system, the opposite might be true. “Due to the interconnectedness of the U.S. financial system, a cyber incident or failure at one interconnected entity may not only impact the safety and soundness of the entity
It seems that not a week goes by without news of a major hack attack on a bank or financial services organization. The latest hacker attack targeted the Russian Central Bank, and cyber-criminals made off with sensitive data from customers of Indian banks who held three million debit cards at five banks.
Cybercrime is one of the most critical growing threats facing the global-banking industry today, and it managed to claim another major victim recently. On the weekend of November 5th and 6th, 2016, Tesco Bank was subjected to a hack that saw £2.5 million siphoned off from 9,000 of its accounts in what some security experts are describing as the most serious attack to ever hit the United Kingdom’s banking sector.
With billions to be made from hacking into their networks, banks around the world are having to expend more resources to thwart the efforts of ever-more enterprising cybercriminals. Although the threat is growing especially to banks in developing countries, efforts to stop it are also strengthening through collaboration among industry partners.