Financial institutions, especially the banks, are getting more worried about the increasing rate of a new cyber attack called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), that has caused huge financial losses running into billions of naira to banks. Financial institutions expressed worries about further loss of funds to DDoS attacks at a security forum organised by MainOne and Radware in Lagos this week and called for technology solutions that would address the threat. During a panel session, Head, Infrastructure Services at Skye Bank, Mr. Tagbo Nnoli, said banks suffered major attacks last year from DDoS attacks on banks and that since then, the banks started seeking solutions to address the issue. Aside DDoS attacks, Nnoli said banks also suffered attacks from phishing and social engineering last year, resulting to huge financial losses. Head, Industry Security Services, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBBS), Mr. Olufemi Fadairo, who confirmed that banks suffered huge financial losses to cyber attacks last year, however said the rate of losses due to online attacks, were beginning to reduce in 2016, following proactive measures taken by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the NIBSS to address financial losses to cyber attacks. According to Fadairo, “NIBSS tries to protect organisations and in the past five years, there has been improvement on financial security. We do benchmarking to find out any disruption of a normal pattern of an organisation. By January 2016, we discussed about DDoS attacks on banks where 63 per cent of banks said such attacks would increase, if not mitigated on time.” Following the threat, we decided to focus on data companies like MainOne that provides data solution for the financial sector, Fadairo said. The Chief Information Security Officer at MainOne, Mr. Chidi Iwe, however raised the hopes of financial institutions at the forum, when he revealed that MainOne had partnered RadWare, a global security company to mitigate DDoS attacks in the country’s financial sector, by redirecting organisation’s traffic to the MainOne DDoS mitigation platform, from where it keeps organisation data fully protected at all times and maintaining the normal operations of organisations on-premises infrastructure. He said the service could detect and mitigate zero-day attack within 18 seconds. According to Iwe, over 50 per cent of enterprise companies globally, suffered DDoS attacks at the end of 2015, and Nigerian businesses are growing in recent yeas and the focus of attacks is gradually shifting to the Nigerian space. Although he said most attacks were not reported publicly in the past, but that there has been over 600 per cent growth in reporting attacks in Nigeria in recent times, based on CBN regulation. Two weeks ago, there was DDoS Attacks in Nigeria. Attacks have caused organisations over $500 billion in recent years, and DDoS attacks are predicted to be on the rise, Iwe said. He however assured financial institutions that the security solution service agreement it signed with Radware in 2016, would address insecurity issues with DDoS attacks. MainOne solution therefore monitors DDoS attacks and create alert for the company using the solution, he said, while listing the benefits of the solution to include online reporting, which allows customers to log online to find out what the trends are. The MainOne solution also offers training for customers in partnership with Radware to boost customer experience. He said capital expenditure CAPEX and operational expenditure OPEX, are completely eliminated by the solution. The Security Solution Architect at Radware, Mr. Eran Danino, while explaining how DDoS operates, said it first attacks firewalls, destroys it before replicating itself into other components. He said most organisations are not ready to mitigate DDoS attack because they either have saturated internet pipes, or they lack the security skills to detect and mitigate attacks. “What we do at Radware is to mitigate the attacks, just as the attackers change their attacking plans regularly,” Danino said. He explained that there was need for organisations to choose the best protection and draw up a checklist to find out the assets that must be protected first. He said Radware uses two approaches to mitigate DDoS attacks, through hybrid solution and full cloud service solution by protecting data from the cloud. Source: http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2016/08/04/cybersecurity-financial-institutions-fret-over-ddos-attacks/

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Cybersecurity: Financial Institutions Fret over DDoS Attacks