Bankers and bank technologists gathered at the Sibos 2018 global conference in Sydney in October to discuss topics like AI and robotics, but topping the list of topics is concern over a potential (and many say imminent) Black Swan-style cyber event looming in our future. 83% of the 1,000 polled at the event agreed that they “expect some sort of 9/11 or Black Swan-type cyber event will happen.”
“Like other disasters, cyber-attacks can hit as suddenly as a catastrophic 100-year storm.”
Black Swan events in the financial sector are not unheard of. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 saw currencies in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore affected while the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008 and Black Monday China in 2015 both impacted stock prices, businesses and currency globally.
“Just because the river is quiet does not mean the crocodiles have left.”
There are many ways to prepare for a cyber security Black Swan event like the creation of a BCM program, employee training and the deployment of a next generation firewall like Sangfor’s NGAF. Sangfor NGAF is a converged security solution providing protection against IPS, advanced threat, malware, viruses, ransomware and web-based attacks using integrated security features like FW, IPS, AV, anti-malware, APT, URL filtering, cloud sandbox, and WAF.
Another easy way to alleviate a few worries about any impending disasters is to implement a disaster recovery and data protection program on your network with a product like Sangfor’s aCloud. With 1-click failover, flexible RPO choices, compression & encryption and visualized DR monitoring among other features, enterprises can relax knowing their data can be recovered. Mark Adair, senior associate at Mason Hayes & Curran says, “Business continuity plans and disaster recovery plans should not be theoretical – they need to be tested and dry-run at regular intervals and updated following the outcome of the test.” Now is the time to implement your protections.
“You can’t prepare for an event, but you can prepare for the impact.”
So, what happens after a security breach or Black Swan event? The 2016 KPMG Consumer Loss Barometer survey says that consumers expect banks and financial institutions to cover losses, communicate frequently, track credit, answer security questions in detail and offer training on safe mobile banking – but 48% of respondents said that they expect their bank to do “all of the above” and would move their account to a different bank if their requirements weren’t met. People expect a lot of their financial institutions, and since we see these so-called “rare” Black Swan events every few years, it’s time to prepare.
Why Sangfor?
Founded in 2000 and a publicly traded company as of 2018 (SANGFOR STOCK CODE: 300454 (CH)) Sangfor Technologies is the global leading vendor of IT infrastructure solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing. Visit us at www.sangfor.com for more information!
