British banks and other financial services firms were given three months on Thursday to explain how they can avoid damaging IT breakdowns and respond to the growing threat of cyber attacks. IT security experts commented below.
Mark James, Security Specialist at ESET:
“Banks and their customers are under continuous attack from cybercriminals because cybercrime is motivated by money and a successful attack against a bank is essentially almost like hitting the ‘cybercrime jackpot’.
To protect against these attacks, banks should deploy security with multiple protective layers over their systems, and ensure operating systems and all other software are kept fully up to date and patched. Education into the current attack techniques is also critical as it allows bank employees as well as customers to understand the danger signs and attackable areas so they can identify when something suspicious appears.
The tools being used by cybercriminals are expanding each and every day, but our knowledge and learning has also increased. Both enterprises and governments can learn and adapt information from the security companies and professionals in the cybersecurity industry to form a good strong layer of defence against those who choose to use software as a malicious tool.”
James Hadley, CEO & Founder at Immersive Labs:
“Preparing for an incident is a key to reduce the impact from either an accidental or deliberate act causing an outage. Organisations need to be proactive in their risk reduction encompassing hardware, software, services and most of their people. Ensuring organisations have the skills required when needed is key to providing confidence both internal and external stakeholders.”
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.