As reported by the Mail on Sunday, Britain’s biggest banks have bolstered their defences against a Russian cyber attack. The plan will mean close co-operation between lenders, so that if hackers took down one bank’s website, its customers would still be able to access their online accounts via another. It involves the use of open banking technology, which allows banks to share certain agreed details of their customers.
A top technology source at one high street bank told The Mail on Sunday that there was a fear Russia will retaliate against Western sanctions by cyber attacks on banks or infrastructure.
Collaboration is key to building stronger defences but it still remains rare across many industries. In order to withstand a full-blown cyberattack, a sturdy path of reliance in place is a robust countermeasure which may not always be considered prior to an attack. Enabling banking customers access to their money at the height of an attack is a critical path of protection for their customers but it will always remain difficult to fully test under simulation conditions. However, this is exactly what banks and other industries need to continue to carry out regularly as only penetration testing on a huge scale will show organisations where the cracks lie and allow them to patch such problems before an inevitable strike.