Ransomware continues to be a source of worry and now U.S. regulatory agencies are getting in the fray. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) published a statement that warns financial institutions about the increasing “frequency and severity of cyber attacks involving extortion.”
The statement, which is a downloadable PDF, mentioned that financial institutions should address this threat by implementing programs that “ensure the institutions are able to identify, protect, detect, respond to, and recover from these types of attacks.”
The FFIEC statement did not cover new regulatory prescriptions, but it did reiterate the agency's previous guidance that financial institutions take precautions against ransomware attacks. They suggest security controls like ongoing information security risk assessments, securely configure systems, protect against unauthorized access, perform security prevention and risk mitigation, and update cybersecurity awareness programs.
Obviously from our perspective, the end-user is a weak link in IT security which needs to be addressed urgently. Effective awareness training also has a great ROI. Find out how affordable this is for your organization and be pleasantly surprised.
