Data and information management

Distributed ledger projects in banking are few and far between — many have stalled and others remain experiments. Robert Townsend, who has worked with banks around the world and written a book about blockchain technology, explains some of the ways financial institutions could be using it, for instance in small-business lending and supply chain finance.

A slew of websites operated by financial institutions, governments and airlines including Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing and Australia’s central bank went down briefly Thursday in the second global internet outage in two weeks.

Before its disappearance, Avaddon said it hacked Valley National Bank's network and threatened to leak sensitive data. The bank is still investigating.

Financial firms can minimize the damage by understanding where key threats lie, educating employees and customers about phishing scams, and breaking down silos between compliance, fraud and security teams.

With the Colonial Pipeline attack still in the news, bank CEOs testifying at a recent hearing cited cyber risk as the biggest threat facing the industry. But members of Congress did not share those concerns, and instead were more focused on criticizing banks about overdraft fees and their level of investment in minority communities.

Scams in which a real person’s information is used to create fictitious businesses or individuals have led to $6 billion in credit losses. The Federal Reserve has developed a standard definition for synthetic identity fraud so lenders can distinguish it from traditional identity theft.

The initiative would standardize and expand security, but marketing restrictions weigh against the business case for adoption.

Hackers, including the group behind the breach at Colonial Pipeline, have posted convincing evidence that they have broken into the servers of community banks in Florida and California and stolen customers' data.

The digital migration caused new risks, and new responsibilities for security professionals.

A proposal still in the early stages to have banks report on customers’ account activity to help the government nab tax evaders is being panned by the industry as overly burdensome and a privacy threat.