G7 countries to collaborate on cyber attack simulation, BoE reveals
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The Bank of England’s regulator the PRA is working with its international counterparts across the G7 group of countries on a simulation exercise to see how the financial sector would respond to and recover from an international cyber attack.
Speaking at this year’s Infosec Europe conference at Excel in East London, Duncan Mackinnon – the PRA’s executive director – said that the simulation exercise (SimEx) – used to evaluate an organisation’s ability to respond to cyber incidents effectively – would take place next April.
“We’re coordinating with the G7 Cyber Expert Group made up of international counterparts from these countries, which is currently being chaired by the Bank of England and our US Treasury colleagues,” he said.
“One of the things we’ll be doing next April will be an international SimEx to see how we can cope with an attack,” he confirmed.
According to Mackinnon, the SimEx is just one of the measures the BoE is taking to build resilience in the financial sector to deal with the impact of attacks when they do succeed.
He also made it clear that the PRA was keen to work with the Financial Conduct Authority and other firms across the sector – including financial service firms, fintech firms and third-party technology providers that are fast becoming a pivotal part of the UK’s financial ecosystem.
“We are very aware of the risk around developing technology including cloud and other managed services providers,” he said.
While some of these tech firms did not fall under the same regulatory remit as financial institutions, MacKinnon added that there was a growing realisation that “if they were to fail or there were disruptions to their services then the impact on the UK financial system would be severe.”