It seems that the banks in UAE have launched a war on hackers with a new cyber threat intelligence initiative. The UAE Banks Federation (UBF), a professional body representing 49 banks as members have made it official yesterday that it is launching a new initiative to combat all future cyber threats.
UBF has launched 2017 The Cyber Threat Intelligence Initiative after the council’s CEO approved a proposal in March to smartly combat with all future emerging cyber threats. The objective of this initiative is to allow banks to better identify, protect, detect and respond to cyber attacks.
As a part of this initiative, all the member banks will have to seamlessly collect, analyze and share data on cyber threats, while allowing anonymous reporting and alert management. The initiative will allow the financial institutions gain an encompassing perceptive of the ongoing cyber threat landscape and will allow to better prepare and respond to all emergent threats.
The initiative which will be collectively funded by all 49 member banks will provide sophisticated methods of sharing cyber threat indicators such as hackers targeting security vulnerabilities of banking sites by scanning open ports or launching brute force scan attacks. This includes the use of DNS tunneling, heartbleed bug, and shellshock bugs.
The new initiative of UBF is being launched to make the banking industry of UAE resilient to cyber attacks by improving their cyber security capabilities and empowering them to effectively control new and evolving threats. Therefore, it will help the banking institutions win the trust of their respective customers by offering greater transaction security.
International Banks which are included as members of UBF include Citibank, Standard Chartered, a bank of Baroda, HSBC Middle East, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, Industrial, and Commercial Bank of China and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.
