European regulators are telling the region’s banks to keep a close eye on potential hacking attacks as tensions with Russia rise over Ukraine.
The European Central Bank has reminded banks in recent weeks to keep up their cyber defenses, according to a person briefed on the discussions. And Germany’s top banking regulator said this week that hacking attacks are a key concern of bank executives in the current environment.
Tensions have soared as Russia amasses more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s border, though officials in Moscow have repeatedly said they have no intention of invading the country. A hacking campaign last month against nearly two dozen Ukrainian government websites was designed to “spread chaos,” a high-ranking official in the country
“Talking to financial services providers at the moment, one of their concerns is, 'Well, if the geopolitics becomes very unstable, what’s going to happen in terms of cyber warfare alongside that?’,” Mark Branson, who leads German watchdog BaFin, said at a conference on Tuesday. “That’s a question we didn’t ask a couple of decades ago. But it’s absolutely front and center of our minds at the moment.”
Branson, who also sits on the ECB’s supervisory board, was responding to a question about tensions with Russia, although he didn’t name the country in his answer.
The ECB, the top banking regulator in the euro area, has pushed lenders to improve their cyber resilience in recent years, notably as they are exposed to additional risks by outsourcing more services and relying increasingly on cloud computing.
The ECB has also asked lenders about their wider financial exposures, a person familiar with the matter said last month.
