Majority of financial firms suffer cyber attacks

A majority of surveyed financial firms faced a cyber attack in the last year, new research has revealed.

Latest research conducted by MetricStream revealed that 66.2% of surveyed financial services institutions have faced at least one cyber attack in the last 12 months.

The research surveyed over 60 banking and financial firms globally including from the banking sector and the asset management industry.

Other figures from the survey revealed that 26.5% of participants believe the recent SWIFT system attacks, where criminals used malware to conduct fraudulent transfers from banks in Asia and Latin America, caused them most concern out of major cyber attacks that occurred within the past year.

In other notable attacks in the last 12 months, 19.1% were concerned by the Morgan Stanley attack which saw 350,000 customer account names, numbers and transaction details stolen by an employee.

Recent industry coverage has focused on how the industry can address the cyber issue.

Research released by the DTCC earlier this week revealed that more than half of respondents consider the continuing cyber threat to be a top-five concern.

Speaking to Global Custodian this month Euroclear CEO for UK and Ireland John Trundle suggested that cyber security had become a business issue rather than a technical issue.

“Cyber security is a topic that must be owned by the business side as well as the IT side. It has to be shared across the firm,” said Trundle.

“Business leaders do not need to understand every last detail of the technical threat, but they need to be on top of the broad types of threat that we face and the best ways to try to mitigate, prevent and respond.”