Article: Rapid digitisation of banks invites cyber risks as well. What are the risks, and what should banks do?
Author: Ishwari Chavan
Published: September 20, 2021, 09:24 IST
Site: CIO.com The Economic Times
Link: Article
Going digital without care is not the way to go for financial institutions. This article reports an increase in cyberattacks focused on banking institutions to a whopping 238% between Feb 2020 and April 2020 (VMWare Carbon Black). Anywhere from phishing, network scanning and probing (Recon work), viruses and website hacking has been methods used in the attempt to penetrate organizations. PII containing applications are particularly vulnerable due to the simple fact that they have “minimal to no security”. With everything moving to some kind of cloud, the boundaries have been deleted and hackers have new ways of “getting in”. Increasing the vulnerable points of an application has increased the risk. Even if the banks are secure, think about the third party applications that interface – Venmo, Facebook, Zelle, and Paypal to name a small few. The article encourages a collaborative effort for financial institutions to counter against these attacks and vulnerabilities. “Banks are required to reimagine some of their own technology and adapt to a three-year or four-year journey.”
Vanessa,
Especially because of the pandemic, many banks had to find a digital solution for their services. Digital transformation should focus on preventing fraud against clients and minimizing system exposure to cyberattacks. Bank leaders must strategize on ways to prevent attacks, identify threats and mitigate the impact of external interference.
I think it’s interesting that the article mentions cryptocurrency and it’s struggle to implement security. I think there’s a lot of value in crypto, but the technology isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. Security will be a big component of increasing adoption as consumers will need to understand how the technology works and how bad actors may try to take it.