Cyber Risk Is A Business Risk As Well

Banks need to be extra-cautious about the possibilities of ransomware attacks. Atul Gupta, partner - IT Advisory and Cyber Security Lead, KPMG in India, analyzes the scenario and suggests preventive measures

N. Mohan: One of the recent cyber threats is ransomware and its latest manifestation is WannaCry. Can you explain how ransomware can impact security systems in banks? Atul Gupta: Ransomware are normally designed to attack on computing resources and the attacker demands ransom (typically in the form of bitcoin) to provide access to resources. The recent ransomware attacks were also designed to encrypt the data and the access was provided to data only when the user would pay the requisite amount to the attackers. Any such attack exposes organizations (including banks) to significant issues relating to lack of information, which may lead to impact on overall business operations. These attacks also lead to impact on reputation of the banks, since in current times majority of transactions are carried out electronically and all stakeholders expect banks to have robust security systems. What are the measures banks should initiate to counter a ransomware attack? Do you think criminals behind such attacks can indeed access the critical data that banks hold? What are the measures banks should take to escape a ransom demand? Ransomware has brought in a change in the form of cyberattacks, where the attacks are becoming broad based rather than being focused on specific information sets and the attacker believes that during such attack there may be critical information which may also get impacted. The measures which should be performed to protect against ransomware attack include: Keep the anti-virus system updated all times

Ensure that security patches released are deployed across the organization

Increase user awareness to not act/ respond to unsolicited emails that demand immediate action

Users should be trained on not clicking on links or downloading email attachments sent from unknown users or which seem suspicious