GCHQ to help the banks in fighting fraud

GCHQ is to start sharing intelligence with British banks in an attempt to tackle fraud and cyber attacks.

The move is part of plans for the spy agency to work more closely with businesses, its director Jeremy Fleming will say today.

It is understood this could range from GCHQ helping prevent credit card and bank account fraud to alerting banks if they become targets of computer hackers. This information can be given to banks in real time thanks to the agency’s 24-hour monitoring of online activity.

Last year it revealed it was preventing around ten serious cyber attacks every week – largely from hostile states.

Mr Fleming will say during a visit to Glasgow: ‘This technological revolution is providing extraordinary opportunity, innovation and progress – but it’s also exposing us to increasing complexity, uncertainty and risk.’

He will point to research which has found just 15 per cent of people know how to protect themselves online and say GCHQ will ‘do more to take the burden of cyber security away from the individual’. He will add: ‘We will share intelligence with banks to enable them to alert customers to threats in close to real time.’

The Daily Mail has called for greater protections for bank scam victims with its Stop The Bank Scammers campaign. According to UK Finance, which represents British banks, financial fraud cost £845million last year – a rise of 16 per cent compared to 2017.

But Mr Fleming believes GCHQ can pass on information quickly to banks which could help them thwart more cases of fraud.

He will add: ‘We have made it simple for our analysts to share time-critical, secret information in a matter of seconds. With just one click, this can be shared and action taken.’

Mr Fleming’s speech opens the two- day CyberUK 2019 conference, an annual gathering of cyber security experts.

It is expected to see cyber officials from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK discuss the biggest threats posed by online attackers. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the gathering was important for cooperation on cyber security matters.

‘Alert customers in close to real time’