Tech Bitch

A really clever ISACA employee called Lynn Lawton says that the number of suspicious and unauthorised intrusion accesses to bank computer systems can be reduced if the banks boost security staff levels and improve governance over outsourcing. Doesn’t this go without saying?

According to the Washington Post, the number of U.S. financial institutions that have experienced a sizeable increase in unauthorised intrusions and bank account losses has increased, and the cost to the banks per incident has soared. I remember this one time when I hit some buttons and it spat out a twenty instead of a ten. Does that count?

Although the Washington Post news story is based on a closed Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation report, the general trend of online bank account attacks and successful intrusions is clearly on an upward trend, judging from news reports over the last year in the U.S. and in Europe. An additional concern suggests that IT staffing levels are an increasing worry for institution managers, as is their reliance on external outsourcing.

Based on this data, if banks are to reduce the number of intrusions on their systems, and so regain the customer trust lost in recent years, they need to implement improved IT governance based on frameworks such as COBIT, which includes consideration of resourcing, training, control automation and monitoring internal and external performance and controls. Yikes, that’s a lot to take onboard!