Online robbery: are our banks safe?

Forget recessions or political upheavals, said Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. The threat that should “truly worry” us all is cybercrime. Consider what happened to Tesco Bank last weekend. In one of the biggest security breaches ever to hit the banking sector, some 40,000 current account customers were hacked, of whom about 9,000 had money plundered. Tesco has promised to refund all the stolen money, thought to total around £2.5m; but it was forced to block all 136,000 current account holders from making online transactions while it investigated the breach. Many customers were unable to make important transactions, such as paying for holidays or groceries, or even house purchases. The consequences ranged from the embarrassing to the “disastrous” – and that’s just from one strike on a relatively new, small bank. Imagine the “panic” if one of the major high-street banks suffered a similar attack.

The scale of this attack may have been unprecedented, said The Times, but it was not wholly unexpected. These are boom times for cybercriminals. British people are now 20 times more likely to be robbed via their computer than mugged in the street. Fraud and cybercrime cost the UK economy an estimated £10.9bn in the year to April. Some of the blame lies with the banks, whose security measures aren’t always up to scratch, and some lies with the customers: an estimated 80% of cybercrime could be prevented by the use of more sophisticated passwords and updated software. But it doesn’t help that the Government has been so slow to wake up to the threat. Internet fraud was only included in the British crime survey for the first time this year – doubling the crime rate at a stroke.

Chancellor Philip Hammond gave a speech last week pledging £1.9bn over five years to boost Britain’s cybersecurity. That’s a paltry amount given the scale of the threat, said John Naughton in The Observer. It’s not just banks that are being targeted: last week a cyberattack forced an NHS trust in Lincolnshire to cancel thousands of operations and appointments over three days. In our digitally dependent world, hackers are the new terrorists. Think of the havoc they could wreak by taking down mobile phone networks, or supermarket supply chains. Yet some relatively simple measures would improve our collective security. Many phones, apps and internet gadgets are “chronically insecure” and vulnerable to malware. It should be a criminal offence for companies to sell such technology; or for individuals to run a networklinked computer that doesn’t have up-to-date security. We all need to take responsibility, before it’s too late.