Cyber Attacks on Banks have doubled in a year says the Financial Conduct Authority(FCA) the UK and that’s due to the sheer neglect of bankers. Yes, you’ve read it right!
The FCA of UK says that some overconfident bankers are making silly errors in crucial computer updates leading to chaos and money loss. Furthermore, as firms are underprepared for hacking attacks, they are putting their customers at risk.
Over the past few years, several money lenders in Britain have suffered a wave of online failures, all due to the blackout of TSB and a big internet maraud at Tesco Bank.
Megan Butler, the Head of Supervisory, FCA says that there has been a 138% rise in technology failures at Finance firms during a year to October. She added that the rise was mostly due to hacking incidents and technical glitches generated from the firms own making.
Speaking at the industry meeting in Central London, Ms. Butler says that the usage trend of Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins and Monero has also led to an increase in cyber attacks like Ransomware- an impending menace to the business world across the globe.
The regulator showed the example of the huge failure which happened this year at Trustee Savings Bank(TSB), which saw over 1.9 million customers locked out of their bank accounts, triggering a massive wave of crime.
Other lenders who have suffered an outage include Barclays, Natwest owner Royal Bank of Scotland and the downtime of Visa servers observed in June this year.
Miss Butler said that most of the banks and financial lenders are overconfident about their ability to manage flagship IT change programs and system updates. And this is what is creating a lot of chaos in the financial sector of UK.
Another failure singled out by Megan was the Tesco Bank’s hack in 2016 where hackers initiated fraudulent transactions from 1000’s of accounts- all due to the failure of bank’s IT staff who failed to put the effective defense in place- life effective cybersecurity measures.
Note- Paul Gillen, the head of Cyber Security Team, Barclays said that the company was facing 100’s of cyber attacks every day and has so far succeeded in mitigating all the risks with great difficulty.
