


War on terabytes

As banking has gone electronic, it has also become vulnerable

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Readers' comments




The government needs to be aware of, understand and be held responsible for its own cyber security and take an active role in communicating and advancing public and financial systems cyber security and predicting attacks. To some degree it's already performing this role. Holding government financially responsible for ensuring banking cyber security hails big government and creates a financial burden for tax payers. This at a time when fiscal responsibility and spending cuts is headed in the opposite direction. Industries need to be held individually accountable for their own cyber security and insurance companies need to see opportunities promoting cyber security and indemnifying loss.

david Wineberg

We do not need to nationalise the security of banks. We have already nationlised their absurd debt so they can keep collecting outlandish salaries and bonuses while investing in fantasy financial products of their own design. They don't expect the armed forces to provide security in their branches. They should not expect the central government to provide security for their websites.


I disagree with the air defense analogy. Corporations wielding stinger missiles would not serve the public interest, and the government wielding them on their behalf doesn't make sense if the threat can be prevented or easily mitigated. No analogy to the physical world is perfect, but one has to carefully consider whether government intervention in the marketplace is appropriate. In the case of the recent DDoS attacks against the banks, the public safety and economic system writ large were never threatened. It is clearly in the banks' fiduciary interest to ensure availability of customer-facing web services by investing in a sufficiently resilient architecture. There's a more compelling case for government intervention to ensure the financial backend architectures are properly protected in advance. In that case, government directed investments in prevention and resiliency are more akin to following fire code and city blackouts when under threat of air attack.


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