Cybersecurity has increasingly become a topic of major concern throughout all economic sectors. The finance sector, due to the common financial motivations of cyber-attackers, remains particularly vulnerable. The changing technological landscape demands vigilance – new emerging technologies require novel cybersecurity solutions and safeguards against criminal attempts to gain access and control over digital assets. These are not limited to technology: human error also contributes to critical vulnerability for organisations. New solutions, guidelines, standards and regulations that enable high levels of resilience, especially in critical infrastructures, are constantly developed and improved, thanks to ongoing global efforts.
SOTER has joined forces with CRITICAL-CHAINS, FINTECH, FINSEC, CyberSec4Europe, CONCORDIA and SPARTA (CAPE Programme), to discuss potential synergies and opportunities for collaboration in order to better understand and tackle these issues together.
Spearheaded by SOTER’s “Cybersecurity in Finance” workshop, which took place on 30 October 2020, in light of the EU’s 8th European Cybersecurity Month, the projects held a series of joint events to exchange knowledge, lessons learned and best practices on cybersecurity and regulatory standards with a focus on the financial sector.
The first workshop included a session with short presentations from SOTER and from each of the participating projects (CRITICAL-CHAINS, FINTECH, FINSEC, CyberSec4Europe, CONCORDIA and SPARTA (CAPE Programme)), followed by a panel session to discuss regulations, cybersecurity, digital identity, and training in the financial sector.
On 27 November 2020, SOTER co-organised the online symposium “Emerging Cybersecurity Standards for the Finance Sector in Europe” with the CRITICAL-CHAINS and FINTECH projects. The symposium included a first session where the three projects presented their research on cybersecurity in the financial sector, followed by a second session where stakeholders from the field discussed their current challenges and needs with regard to cybersecurity and standardisation.
The symposium has been especially fruitful to gather feedback on SOTER’s Cybersecurity Competence Training Design Process from a wider range of stakeholders.
On 14 December 2020 SOTER took part in a third joint workshop (organised by CRITICAL-CHAINS): “Financial Sector Infrastructure Cyber-Physical Security and Regulatory Standards”, focused on risk-based cyber-physical security authentication and accountability models for monitoring, compliance assurance and regulatory harmonisation challenges.
It included presentations and contributions from SOTER and representatives of different projects (CRITICAL-CHAINS, CyberSec4Europe, CS-AWARE and CONCORDIA) as well as other organisations from the financial sector.
FINSEC’s workshop “Recent Security Advances in the Finance Sector” closed the series on 14 January 2021. The aim of this workshop was to better understand the main security challenges faced nowadays by financial organizations and the newest solutions available to tackle them. The workshop stimulated discussions about novel approaches in risk assessment and mitigation and helped understand the role of leading technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the resilience of financial institutions. Presentations from the workshops can be found here.
Author: Corinna Pannofino, Trilateral Research
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