The boss of one of many UK’s largest banks has mentioned the specter of cyber assaults “retains me awake at night time”.
Ian Stuart, the CEO of HSBC UK, mentioned cyber safety was “prime of the agenda” for his banking group, and coping with IT vulnerabilities was an “monumental” expense for the sector as a complete.
He mentioned: “It does fear me – we may be attacked and we’re being attacked on a regular basis.”
Mr Stuart and different financial institution bosses have been talking to the Commons Treasury Committee which has been taking proof on a spread of points affecting the trade, together with how susceptible it’s to outages and cyber assaults.
In March, it emerged nine major banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours – the equal of 33 days – of tech outages up to now two years.
In latest weeks, retailers Co-op and Marks and Spencer have skilled extreme disruption after being focused by hackers.
Lisa Forte, of the cyber safety firm Crimson Goat, advised BBC Information that Mr Stuart had made “an extremely essential level”.
“Cyber assaults are growing in each quantity and severity,” she mentioned.
“Criminals are monetising assaults extra effectively and we’re at a degree now the place it very a lot is when not if companies will expertise an assault.”
Mr Stuart mentioned his banking group was spending a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of kilos bettering its IT techniques.
“I feel the sum of money banks – all of us – will probably be placing into our techniques is big,” he mentioned.
“The defence mechanisms you set in are completely essential.”
Throughout his group, he mentioned they’re processing 1000 funds a second whereas making 8000 IT adjustments and updates each week.
Barclays, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Financial institution, Financial institution of Eire and Allied Irish Financial institution have additionally offered data to the committee.
Between January 2023 and February this 12 months, they skilled 158 IT failures between them.
Vim Maru, CEO of Barclays, addressed MPS concerning the Barclays outage which occurred on what was January pay day for many individuals.
Critical IT issues affected on-line banking for a number of days, left some folks unable to maneuver residence – and will outcome within the financial institution going through compensation funds of £12.5m, a report has found.
Mr Maru apologised to prospects, saying he was “deeply sorry for the disruption”. He mentioned there was no proof it was triggered a cyber incident or a malicious act.
Following the Barclays incident in January, about 1.2m folks within the UK had been then affected by additional banking outages in February.
These issues occurred at Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC.
