SWIFT, a global provider of financial messaging services, has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) ) with Fox-IT, helping meet Cybersecurity challenges facing the financial community in Europe and beyond, per a SWIFT statement.
Fox-IT is a cyber security specialist, which together with SWIFT will look to combat one of the growing specters in the financial services industry - hacking or breaches of secure files and banking systems. Earlier this year hackers attacked the Bangladesh central bank, a heist that culminated in the theft of over $81 million, which has shifted some focus by major financial institutions towards cyber security.
Per the new collaboration between SWIFT and Fox-IT, both groups are emphasizing cyber security, and in conjunction with BAE Systems, are supporting SWIFT in the implementation of the cooperative’s Customer Security Programme (CSP). The Customer Security Programme was launched earlier this year in June, which serves as a dedicated initiative aimed at reinforcing and evolving the security of global banking sector.
New Initiative
Under the information sharing initiative, the group will effectively be investigating customer security incidents and supports customers’ own investigations. For SWIFT’s part, the group has already published customer-anonymised findings about the impetus and possible origins of the attacks, which developed multiple Indicators of Compromise (IoCs), and provided customers with details on how to protect against such attacks.
Moreover, the new collaboration will also be working in tandem with several other measures introduced through SWIFT’s CSP – the intelligence-gathering and forensic initiative has already yielded results, which have played a vital role in detecting and preventing attacks against SWIFT customers to date.
