Cybersecurity: Financial Institutions Fret over DDoS Attacks

Financial institutions, especially the banks, are getting more worried about the increasing rate of a new cyber attack called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), that has caused huge financial losses running into billions of naira to banks. Financial institutions expressed worries about further loss of funds to DDoS attacks at a security forum organised by MainOne and Radware in Lagos this week and called for technology solutions that would address the threat. During a panel session, Head, Infrastructure Services at Skye Bank, Mr. Tagbo Nnoli, said banks suffered major attacks last year from DDoS attacks on banks and that since then, the banks started seeking solutions to address the issue. Aside DDoS attacks, Nnoli said banks also suffered attacks from phishing and social engineering last year, resulting to huge financial losses.

Head, Industry Security Services, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBBS), Mr. Olufemi Fadairo, who confirmed that banks suffered huge financial losses to cyber attacks last year, however said the rate of losses due to online attacks, were beginning to reduce in 2016, following proactive measures taken by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the NIBSS to address financial losses to cyber attacks. According to Fadairo, “NIBSS tries to protect organisations and in the past five years, there has been improvement on financial security.We do benchmarking to find out any disruption of a normal pattern of an organisation. By January 2016, we discussed about DDoS attacks on banks where 63 per cent of banks said such attacks would increase, if not mitigated on time.” Following the threat, we decided to focus on data companies like MainOne that provides data solution for the financial sector, Fadairo said.

The Chief Information Security Officer at MainOne, Mr. Chidi Iwe, however raised the hopes of financial institutions at the forum, when he revealed that MainOne had partnered RadWare, a global security company to mitigate DDoS attacks in the country’s financial sector, by redirecting organisation’s traffic to the MainOne DDoS mitigation platform, from where it keeps organisation data fully protected at all times and maintaining the normal operations of organisations on-premises infrastructure.