A senior official from Bank of England (BoE) feels that the country will need a “super shield” against catastrophic cyber attacks or major IT glitches that have the potential to cripple the entire financial industry.
As a precautionary measure, the BoE is already taking actionable measures to see that banks operating in the region could recover quickly from financial outages caused by cyber attacks. This includes devising plans to mitigate cyber risks on transaction gateways and timescales.
However, Nick Strange, the director of BoE in a supervisory risk specialist position says that private sector banks should well coordinate with public sectors by coming up with a collective solution to this regard.
In the United States, a private sector initiative has been devised by the authorities to protect customers and financial institutes from cyber frauds. Called as Sheltered Harbor it is helping win public confidence in the financial system in the time of catastrophic events like cyber attacks.
As a part of this 2015 initiative, US financial sectors are asked to provide copies of customer account data to a centrally maintained repository from where companies can restore back data if in case their on-premises database suffers an outage due to a malware attack like ransomware. BoE is intending to architect a backup solution similar to ‘Sheltered Harbor’ by Sept’19 to become resilient to a wide range of cyber attacks.
After France which leads the G7 countries to completes a simulation of a cyber attack by next month, BoE is also said to pilot a cyber stress test on financial companies operating in its region to test how many customers and payments will be hit by an outage and how fast the IT assets can be recovered in this event. Means, it is going to test the skills of “Impact Tolerance” running in the institutions.
