UK finance firms urged to work together to fight cyber
crime
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[April 23, 2018]
By Emma Rumney
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's financial
firms need to pull together to fight cyber crime, working with
government and law enforcement to attack criminals' infrastructure and
put them out of business, a report by KPMG and industry body UK Finance
said on Monday.
The report argues the growing threat cyber crime poses to the financial
sector cannot be countered just by spending more money, and that a
revamped approach is needed.
This includes working together and with governments and law enforcement
to render the markets, tools and systems cyber criminals use
ineffective, it said.
"(That) imposes cost on them (the criminals), because they then have to
reconstruct that botnet, those phishing sites," said David Ferbrache,
technical director and head of cyber and space at KPMG.
"For us it's very much a bit of a call to arms across the community ...
There's a lot more we can do," he said.
Some groups, such as the Cyber Defence Alliance, whose members include
some of the world's biggest banks, are already doing this, but different
initiatives need to be linked up, report authors Ferbrache and Dan
Crisp, interim director of technology and digital policy at UK Finance,
told Reuters.
Cyber crime is big business, with the global impact exceeding $450
billion a year, and is now second only to political risk in terms of
challenges facing the financial sector, according to the report.
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A projection of cyber code on a hooded man is pictured in this
illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration
The attack on the Bank of Bangladesh in 2016, where hackers made off with $81
million, shows the growing sophistication of attacks on financial firms, it
said. Banks' cyber chiefs have also warned that tools previously only available
to nation states are now being used by criminals.
While UK banks alone spent $360 million on IT in 2016, it continued, approaches
are often slow and constrained by regulation relative to the methods used by
cyber criminals, who can operate beyond borders and the law and are constantly
updating their methods.
This requires a quicker and more collaborative response, both within and among
affected firms and law enforcement and governments, the report said.
"Ultimately, the financial sector as a community needs to organize this
themselves," said Ferbrache.
(Reporting by Emma Rumney; Editing by Mark Potter)
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