The survey by consultancy Deloitte has found that customers are
the common weak link in allowing the viruses, worms and hacking
attacks on to financial services companies' IT systems.
Deloitte surveyed senior information technology executives at
many of the top 100 global financial services firms. It found that
65% of firms had experienced external IT security breaches in the
last year.
The security problems plaguing banks most are viruses and worms,
email attacks such as spam, and those attacks focused directly on
the customer. The common factor in all of these problems is people,
according to the research.
"All of these breaches are perpetrated via the customer," it
said. "For example, a customer receives an electronic,
official-looking request on what appears to be their bank’s
letterhead, requesting sensitive information (e.g. account
information, passwords, etc.). By emailing back that information,
the customer has effectively granted the crook access to their
personal financial data and to the financial institution."
"You can have the best technical systems in place but they are
unlikely to operate effectively unless you educate people on their
obligations and how to fulfil them," said Mike Maddison, head of
security and privacy services at Deloitte in the UK.
While recognising that customer security was a major issue, two
thirds of the companies said that they did not want to be
responsible for the customer's IT security because of the enormity
of such a task.
The survey also highlighted the problems that are caused by the
kinds of close business partnerships that are becoming increasingly
common as outsourcing becomes more popular.
"These incidents highlight the risks inherent in third party and
business partner relationships. In the eyes of the media and the
public, the organisation that owns the data is always at fault,
even if the problem originated with a service provider or a
business partner," it said.
"Financial institutions rarely, if ever, escape media and
regulatory scrutiny when such incidents occur. It is the
responsibility of the financial institution to manage its
third-party relationships, including those with business partners
and vendors. The onus is on these organizations who value their
brands to protect their data in an end to end manner, in all
formats and in all media, whether that data is within the
organization’s premises or within the premises of a business
partner or service provider," it said.
The survey discovered that such security problems may not be
solved soon, though. It discovered that most senior company
management only pay lip service to solving the problems. In 66% of
the surveyed companies, an information security strategy is
considered a 'key imperative' at executive management level, and
63% of companies have such a strategy.
But only at 10% of the companies is the strategy 'led and
embraced' by business leaders, according to survey respondents.
"Herein lies the paradox: even though information security
incidents are grabbing the attention of business executives and
boards, these individuals do not yet feel that they “own” the
problem; in their estimation, the execution of solutions are the
mandate of IT," it said.
