The boss of one of many UK’s greatest banks has mentioned the specter of cyber assaults “retains me awake at evening”.
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 an entire.
He mentioned: “It does fear me – we might 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 weak 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 previously two years.
In current weeks, retailers Co-op and Marks and Spencer have skilled extreme disruption after being focused by hackers.
Lisa Forte, of the cyber safety firm Pink Goat, instructed BBC Information that Mr Stuart had made “an extremely necessary level”.
“Cyber assaults are rising 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 tens of millions of kilos bettering its IT methods.
“I believe the amount of cash banks – all of us – will likely be placing into our methods is gigantic,” he mentioned.
“The defence mechanisms you place in are completely crucial.”
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 supplied info 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 in regards to 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 dwelling – and will end result within the financial institution dealing with 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 precipitated 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.
