Financial services sector recipient of increasing rate of cyber attacks

Financial services organisations in UK reportedly, have been receiving ransomware and phishing assaults as the maximum incidences of cyber assaults, however, in reality for maximum instances the reasons for outages have been much more ordinary. The regulator of financial services organisations namely Financial Conduct Authority got reported with 819 online attacks during 2018, accounting for a massive increase from 69 reported during 2017.

RSM the audit and consulting company, which submitted a report titled "Freedom of Information Request," estimates that retail banks reported the maximum number of incidences (486) to the watchdog, with wholesale financial sector reporting 115 incidences, while 53 reports from retail investment companies followed.

The most frequent reason for a cyber incident to happen has been "3rd-party failure" throwing a probable reflection on IT infrastructure's interconnected behavior. Such incidents were responsible for 21 percent of the reported cases. This was followed with software and hardware-related incidences accounting for 19 percent while change management was responsible for 18 percent. Cyber-attacks comprised the reason accounting for the fourth commonest one. In 2018, financial services companies reported 93 cyber attacks on the sector, with more than 46 of them found to be phishing attacks, while slightly over 18 were ransomware. www.zdnet.com posted this, July 1, 2019.

Whilst cyber incidents look as increasing alarmingly according to RSM, the probable reason for this is companies becoming more proactive with respect to making incident reports to FCA alongside a heightened focus on reporting hacks that compromised data or security ever-since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) arrived.

An enormous number of online attacks were reportedly associated with change management, outlining that alterations in IT environments would be risky, if IT operations weren't getting managed properly.

Data privacy specialist Nigel Hawthorn at McAfee says it's important that financial institutions make use of appropriate technology, processes and people for an effective protection against human error and cyber attacks; identify any threats at the earliest from their occurrences; and incase attacked, rectify their systems fast. Apprehending dented customer trust as well as fines from regulators looming because of any data hack, it's never been so high of the hazards.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/9/2019