Background

Cyber Security preparedness for a Bank would always be a challenging journey. Managing risks of People, Process and Technology becoming more thought-provoking with today’s digitalized Banking context. Banks are becoming more prominent life style partner for customers. Different layers of digital channels have been opened to facilitate demanding customer needs and also to improve customer experience. With digitization, there are set of new technology risks opened for Banks which were not existed before.

This risk exposure has resulted in new ways and means for hackers to explore. As a result, Cyber-attacks are becoming more innovative, complex and advance day by day. Hackers always able to find a way out from safeguards in place. A small weakness could be leveraged by an attacker to do a significant damage to an organization. There’s a famous saying “An attacker only needs to be successful at occasion”. A Bank should have systematical approach to improve its Cyber resilience. Cybersecurity can be an important and amplifying component of a Bank’s overall risk management. A Bank shall consider to position itself based on below preparedness principles against its actual implementation.

Any organization should realize that there’s no “Silver bullet” for Cyber and Information security while it’s a journey of achieving different maturity levels over a period of time. Below systematical approach is prepared to improve Cyber resilience in a Bank. A Bank shall build a strategy to strengthen its Cyber Security preparedness in line to below principles;

• Identify;
• Protect;
• Detect;
• Respond; and
• Recover.

Below is detailed elaboration above principles and what’s recommended to be in place.

Prepared for the Asian Bankers Association by:

Suresh Emmanuel
Chief Information Security Officer
Hatton National Bank PLC