Following the Tesco Bank attack that left 9,000 Tesco customers with £2.5 million in fraudulent transactions, the UK banking sector enacted contingency plans that enable members to share critical intelligence information in hopes to prevent these kinds of attacks.
The news was published in the Bank of England’s latest Financial Stability Report that claims, “High-profile incidents in 2016 have raised awareness of the importance for institutions of ensuring that they have appropriate controls and measures in place to counter fraud. In response to the recent incident at Tesco Bank, the UK authorities activated a contingency plan, as part of the Authorities’ Response Framework, to share intelligence across firms, allowing other institutions to review their own resilience to such threats.”
Tesco initially froze the 9,000 customer accounts as a precaution, refusing to allow online transactions from current accounts, but cash withdrawals, chip & PIN payments, and existing bill payments and direct debits were allowed to continue business as usual.
Security experts believe organizations globally need to get better at information sharing if they want to improve their cyber security posture. The amount of cyber-attacks companies’ face on a daily basis is on the incline, and by sharing intelligence with other organizations they can better prepare for a cyber attack and know what to look out for.
But unfortunately, a study conducted by BDO Technology Advisory Services last month found that only 27% of US firms currently share information on cyber-attack to third parties.
Those within the financial sector are no stranger to Sarbanes-Oxley SOX compliance and what needs to be done to achieve compliance. This standard requires all publicly held companies to establish internal controls and procedures for financial reporting to reduce the possibility of corporate fraud. Meaning your entire IT estate- servers, networks, to IT practices and operations- must be reinforced and configured to maintain and demonstrate compliance in the event of an audit.
From an internal controls SOX 404 standpoint, NNT’s Change Tracker Gen7 ensures IT systems are protected from fraud, with requisite audit trails provided to prove system integrity has been maintained, followed by systems hardening and provisioning a strict ‘principle of least privilege’ basis. And lastly, the provision of a ‘Closed Loop’ Change Management System to show exactly what changed and by whom at any stage in order to govern system integrity.
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