The cyber-resilience of financial institutions: significance and applicability

Abstract

The growing sophistication, frequency and severity of cyberattacks targeting financial sector institutions highlight their inevitability and the impossibility of completely protecting the integrity of critical computer systems. In this context, cyber-resilience offers an attractive complementary alternative to the existing cybersecurity paradigm. Cyber-resilience is defined in this article as the capacity to withstand, recover from and adapt to the external shocks caused by cyber risks. Resilience has a long and rich history in a number of scientific disciplines, including in engineering and disaster management. One of its main benefits is that it enables complex organizations to prepare for adverse events and to keep operating under very challenging circumstances. This article seeks to explore the significance of this concept and its applicability to the online security of financial institutions. The first section examines the need for cyber-resilience in the financial sector, highlighting the different types of threats that target financial systems and the various measures of their adverse impact. This section concludes that the “prevent and protect” paradigm that has prevailed so far is inadequate, and that a cyber-resilience orientation should be added to the risk managers’ toolbox. The second section briefly traces the scientific history of the concept and outlines the five core dimensions of organizational resilience, which is dynamic, networked, practiced, adaptive, and contested. Finally, the third section analyses three types of institutional approaches that are used to foster cyber-resilience in the financial sector (and beyond): (i) a thriving cybersecurity industry is promoting cyber-resilience as the future of security; (ii) standards bodies are embedding cyber-resilience into some of their cybersecurity standards; and (iii) regulatory agencies have developed a broad range of compliance tools aimed at enhancing cyber-resilience.

Cyber risk management: History and future research directions

“…They advocate a holistic approach based on a systems perspective considering interactions between risks and developing risk governance that promotes resilience in dealing with adaptive adversaries. The resilience concept originated in material sciences, was adopted by psychology in the 1970s, and later applied to urban resilience and disaster management (Dupont, 2019). This multidisciplinary interest indicates the broad appeal of the concept, but research is still fragmented and difficult to generalize and apply to the cyber domain (Bagheri & Ridley, 2017; Linkov et al, 2013a).…”

Proposal and Validation of a Standard Protection Profile for Homologation of Commercial Videoconferencing Equipment

“…They also bring together functional, business, human, trustworthiness, timing, data, boundaries, composability, and lifecycle elements [47]. Resilience is a particularly highlighted issue in the current literature [72; 78], especially in the financial sector [78].…”

Ciberataques

“…La materialización de un ciberataque es una situación que rompe con las certezas que se tienen en los modelos tradicionales de seguridad y control, lo que crea inestabilidad e incierto en las actuaciones de las naciones y empresas. Por tanto, es necesario reconstruir los supuestos de base del entendimiento de la dinámica empresarial para pasar de una postura de "riesgo cero" a una política de umbrales de operación, donde se reconoce la falla como parte inherente de la práctica empresarial y como base de una cultura de aprendizaje que hace más resistente a la empresa y la nación frente a estos eventos (Dupont, 2019).…”