Cybersecurity is changing fast and for banks, who works well collectively on security must ensure it continues to be prepared all the time for cyber-attacks, says ANZ Group CEO Shayne Elliott,.
Elliott told the Australia-Papua New Guinea Business Council Breakfast in Port Moresby on Friday that for ANZ and all banks alike, millions of dollars are spent on cyber security measures annually.
“Ninety-eight per cent of all the emails that come to ANZ are rejected, so even though you may think that I get a lot of emails, we are actually seeing 2 per cent of the things that are coming into the bank, 98 per cent of those are rejected,” he said.
“At ANZ today, we have a cyber-attack every four minutes, so every four minutes we are being attacked by some sort of either criminal or whatever body is trying to break in.
“We spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars every year on cybersecurity. We have major rooms that are set up to monitor attacks … a lot of the really low-end attacks will be from simple attacks from things through emails.
“The difficultly about cybersecurity is that it is really changing and so it is a bit of an arms race of how do banks continue to invest.”
Elliott said security for banks had always been traditional.
“Go back to history and think about banks, how did we keep things secure? In the old days, it was money so we built branches that were really strong, marble, bars around the windows, we have security guards with guns and that is physically how we kept things safe. There was a lot of psychology there, that was how we communicated it so that people felt safe. A fence means that your money is secure, safe.”
He said in today’s’ world, it is about digital money and protection of identity and data.
“We move into the new world and it is not about physical money anymore, it is about digital money and it is about data.”
Elliott said security is about protecting the banking sector.
“We have to protect ourselves and no different from your home,” he said. “We have to put up security systems and hopefully our security systems are better.
“We are constantly upgrading those systems and, but the other thing for us is that we need to prepare for the neighbourhood, so I rather that they do not come to our neighbourhood at all, and so there are a lot of investment across the banking industry and strengthening the industry.
“Actually, banks work really well together on security because it is in all our interests that the system is safe because our business is so interconnected. We are not an island, we are completely interconnected together as a system, we spend a lot to strengthen the system and so we try to protect our neighbourhood (to be) as strong as possible.
“I am not an expert on this stuff but I can say that it costs a huge amount of money and we are today showing that the banking system is remarkable resilient when it comes to security, it is never going to stop.
“We used to have bank robberies, right? People come into the banks with knives and guns and rob money, that pretty much doesn’t happen anymore because there is no money in branches, the money is online so bad people has moved.
“We are in a business of looking after your money and data security and moving around safely when you ask us to, so it is just a matter of constantly upgrading those cybersecurity skills.”
Meanwhile, Bank of Papua New Guinea Governor Loi Bakani says that because of globalisation and digitalisation, identity is now at the heart of every transaction.
“Today, identity is the only way that we can reconcile the law, policy and regulation with the range of transactions that can be done over the internet. Our citizens need legal protection, support and online safety.
“Stopping the flood of fake news, making e-government work, economic empowerment of women, expanding the domestic economy and creating new markets here, as well as accessing markets abroad via the internet, require that we know who we are dealing with.”
Last month, an expert speaking at the PNG Security Congress in Port Moresby, said there needed to be more awareness in the country on cybersecurity.
“We need to raise awareness on cyber security because PNG is slowly developing,” Alberto Cimas, Deloitte PNG’s IT and cybersecurity specialist, said .
“Technologies are slowly entering the country.
“We read the newspapers and we see articles on Artificial Intelligence, but we have never seen it with our own eyes.
“For us, it is like a theory, it is not really being implemented.
“I see it in the news every single day about big data and data analy-tics. There are about five companies using big data analytics tools to do reports.
“We hear stories of blockchain.
“I hear we have only one experience of blockchain that has been done by the Bank of Papua New Guinea.”
Cimas said cybersecurity was the No.1 risk for many businesses in the world and Papua New Guinea businesses should catch up in that area.
“This cyber security risks are real and they are in your companies,” he said.
He said hacking a system was easy and could be done by anyone.
“Cybersecurity risks are
real but you do not have to be an expert to break into the system,” he said.
“Even cars have cybersecurity holes. This includes the virus designed to rewrite the firmware of the car and install malicious code.”
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