Ransomware Now Considered a “Crisis” in the Financial Services Sector

A recent panel discussion of banking CISOs and experts at the SIBOS conference focused on the current state of ransomware and what institutions should do to protect themselves.

Each year, SWIFT – the global provider of messaging solutions for banking and payments – puts on their SIBOS conference, where business and technology executives from financial institutions around the world gather to understand the state of the financial services industry. A panel discussion at that conference entitled “Ransomware on the Rise” began with the question of whether ransomware was a crisis or not.

“Do I think there is a crisis? Absolutely," said Robert Boyce, Global Cyber Resilience Lead at Accenture

This crisis exists because of three factors:

• The resurgence of targeting critical infrastructure, including financial services
• The move away from encryption to just data theft and extortion
• Threat actors are leveraging best of breed services and products from within the cybercrime ecosystem that make attacks faster and more successful

Recommendations to address the threat of ransomware included a lengthy discussion around planning and testing, as well as assessing the security of your supply chain, and implementing layers of security controls – which we believe should include security awareness training to help reduce the likelihood that phishing and social engineering attacks aiding in the initial attack on an institution are successful.

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