UK Bankers Warned of Cybercrime

Top UK bankers were told to take the risk of cyber attacks more seriously. According to statistics, cybercrime costs the global economy £285bn annually. The most vulnerable targets are banks, even despite their efforts to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on defense. From year to year, sophisticated attackers continue trying to steal money or sensitive information. The examples are numerous: for instance, cyber criminals stole details of 83 million clients from JPMorgan Chase and hacked Sony Pictures, leaking a few of its movies and other data.
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Media reports revealed that Bank of England and some companies providing financial services may take a voluntary test known as CBEST. In other words, they may hire hackers in order to attack them and test their resilience. After them, other largest banks and key financial institutions in the country may also be required to take this test.

According to the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank of England, banks in the country need to do more than pass health checks on their ability to handle financial shocks, urging boards to improve the way their firms are operated. A few weeks ago, the Bank of England revealed that the biggest lenders in the UK, except for the Co-operative Bank, had passed stress tests of how well prepared they were.

You may know that the UK banks have been involved in various scandals: for example, they tried to fix benchmark interest and foreign exchange rates. In other occasion, they were mis-selling loan insurance and complex hedging products to small enterprises.

As a result, the Bank of England came to a conclusion that today it needs strong, effective and well-informed management and governance arrangements in order to rebuild confidence in the banking system.