While banks are beefing up their resilience against growing cyber threats, they are increasingly worried that external service providers might let them down.
Asia Pacific banks have cited the security of third-party service providers and attacks on payment systems, especially international systems and those in less experienced countries, as their top concerns so far this year, according to the H1 2019 «Asia Pacific Cyberthreat Review.»
The survey, published by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (FS-ISAC), found that banks are worried that attacks on payment systems could directly affect them by causing disruptions to capabilities of financial services, reputational risk and loss of consumer confidence.
FS-ISAC also said its members were concerned about how the security of third-party service providers could have residual impacts on their operations, given recent events like the Wipro breach (India), ASUS Live Update attack (Taiwan) and LandMark White cyberattack (Australia).
New Ways Threats Operate
«Threat actors have changed the way that they operate,» said Brian Hansen, executive director, FS-ISAC APAC. «We are seeing more time spent on preparation and reconnaissance prior to initiating attacks to ensure attacks are successful and against the best targets, be it a person or information system on a network.»
FS-ISAC is an intelligence gathering and sharing initiative for the financial sector founded in 1999, with over 7,000 members worldwide. The nine countries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC), region are Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
