|
The
test, for which no date has yet been set, will focus on how
regulators for the world's two biggest financial centers in New
York and London communicate in an emergency, a spokesman for
British government cyber-security body CERT-UK said.
"It is testing how we would react to 'x' scenario, how would our
colleagues in the U.S. react to the same, (and) how would we
then coordinate communications with each other, to the sector
and within the sector," he said.
"There will be no testing of cash machines coming down, banks
coming down or anything like that," he added, contradicting an
earlier media report.
U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David
Cameron agreed last January to hold the joint exercise this year
and coordinate their responses to an online attack on their
financial sectors.
Businesses on both sides of the Atlantic have shown
vulnerability to hacking. Just last month, hacking attacks
threatened to compromise the data of 4 million customers of
British telecoms company TalkTalk and 15 million clients of
T-Mobile US Inc.
The CERT-UK spokesman said no final decision had been made on
the exact scenarios for the exercise or the banks that would
take part. The U.S. Treasury, Britain's finance ministry, the
Bank of England (BoE) and U.S. regulators would take part and
intelligence agencies are also likely to play a role, he said.
The BoE said earlier this year that British banks needed to do
more to bolster their defenses against cyber attacks, and might
require them to conduct tests of how easily their systems could
be hacked or suffer other weaknesses.
(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
|
