Last week, FDIC’s fintech research and innovation lab, FDITECH announced its tech sprint evaluating the most pertinent challenges and dangers associated with the current fintech environment. As part of FDITECH’s tech sprint, FDIC intends to invite participants from the fintech industry who can identify and mitigate complex issues in the fintech world, and showcase new resilience to sustain in a highly disruptive ecosystem.
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The theme of the tech sprint is “From Hurricanes to Ransomware: Measuring Resilience in the Banking World.” FDITECH’s spring program will emphasize cooperation and competition among various stakeholders from the modern banking and financial services industries. These include banks, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, private and public companies, and fintech developers. These groups would focus on stringent benchmarks laid down by FDIC, working together to provide “a problem statement and selected teams will devote their collective energy and expertise towards addressing specific challenges.”
FDITECH is at the center of the US’s data-driven digital banking and payments economy. Its prime goal is to encourage new innovative and transformative financial technologies for an accelerated digital transformation of bank-customer relationships, within a fully-secured environment.
Through participation in the tech sprint for the banking companies, FDIC seeks an answer to:
“What would be the most helpful set of measures, data, tools, or other capabilities for financial institutions, particularly community banks, to use to determine and to test their operational resilience against a disruption?”
Participants would be allowed to make a presentation and then be judged by an elite panel.
In the past few months, the IT systems of the top US companies have been single-pointedly targeted by ransomware agents and cyber threat artists from around the globe. As companies modernize their IT systems to embrace digital processes across departments, cybercriminals have found new ways and methods to exploit vulnerabilities within the newly adopted systems. Of these, ransomware and phishing attacks have been the most recurring of cybercrimes, scooping out billions of dollars from IT systems, devices, and storage units.
Looking at the barrage of recent cyberattacks on the US-based digital properties, the US Government introduced “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency [USA] / CISA. CISA defines ransomware as a highly sophisticated form of malware designed to encrypt and mask IT files or digital devices, attacking them in such a manner that the files / information is either inaccessible to the administrators or is left completely unusable by virtue of encryption / locking. Cybercriminals extort victims, forcing them to pay up for unlocking / decryption of the inaccessible files in exchange for a ransom, which is often demanded in the form of cryptocurrencies/ bitcoins, thereby leaving no trace of the financial trail that could eventually lead to the attackers.
The tech sprint from FDIC has made a timely landfall, even as attackers are “sprinting” ahead of the target industries by embracing new technologies such as blockchain, Auto ML and the latest technique, called as ‘ ransomware as a service.” Yes, FDITECH’s tech sprint does sound like a hackathon or bug bounty program, but it has the scope of informing and safeguarding fintech companies from falling into new traps of ransomware and digital fraud.
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The overall mission of this program is to build wide-scale resilience across the industry, regain the public’s confidence in security frameworks, and invite applications from cyber security experts to work for the strengthening of the US Financial system.
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Any US bank is at an equally high risk as its global partner or competitor.
Ransomware agents spare none. It’s important for the US Financial system to buck up against the wave of cyberattacks, and build a highly resilient banking infrastructure based on safety protocols, data governance, automation and predictive intelligence. The emergence of AI ML, Data Science, and Robotics process automation are already playing key roles in respective fintech domains, ensuring minimal damage from such attacks. However, FDITECH lab’s initiative to sprout a tech sprint reveals there’s still a lot left to be done in the areas where fintech solutions and applications could be used beneficially to mitigate resilience risks in the ecosystem, especially by bridging the gaps in IT data management, cybersecurity, and AIOps.
Reporting of an Incident
CISA recommends every company to report any ransomware incident, irrespective of the scale and timeline of the incident. Victims can approach the FBI, CISA or the US Secret Service to report their incident which would then be notified to other agencies based on the extent of risk and damage to the US’s financial system.
CISA recommends routine IT checkups to find out vulnerabilities, backing up important data in an offline mode in an encrypted manner, and regularly patching up systems as primary activities to tackle the menace of ransomware attacks.
Source; FDITECH
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