NAIROBI – Efforts to curb increased cyber crime within Africa’s financial institutions have gained momentum with a major banking cyber security conference set for next month in Kigali, Rwanda.
The one-day conference scheduled for March 23 is a partnership between Security Africa and technology companies Secure Payment solutions (SPS) and IBM. It is designed to highlight key Information Technology security threats, fraud, risk and regulatory issues affecting financial institutions, government agencies as well as public and private organizations in their operations.
This comes against the backdrop of the much needed frontline measures required to protect infrastructure within organizations and systems from the current IT-related threats as a key strategic priority, with cyber attack identified as a top tier risk over the coming years.
“The Banking and Cyber Security workshop will bring together key stakeholders from the governments, law enforcement agencies, finance institutions and leading ICT security experts to help in finding a lasting solution to address cyber crime,” said the Africa manager for Cyber SecAfrica Sammy Kioko.
Target participants include bank managers, compliance personnel, information technology managers and those responsible for IT security within their respective organisation and those who develop information security policies and procedures. The meeting comes at a time when various system improvements adopted by organizations in the Eastern and Central Africa to rein in high rates of fraud have proved futile as fraudsters have become increasingly smarter, skimming out larger amounts from target banks.
Banks have become the most affected in the scams, with a recent industry survey conducted on banks in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia indicating that threats like hacking, malicious insiders, card skimming, electronic files manipulation, IT controls circumvention, unauthorized penetration and careless employees have surged as new core banking systems intended for enhanced IT security become more expensive to acquire and deploy.
Mr Kioko said the security focused event will help all players to identify the technical, environmental and business risks that could lead to service vulnerability, weaken consumer confidence and ultimately cause brand damage and serious revenue decline. “It will deliver ideas to help stakeholders articulate and implement appropriate risk management strategies, optimize internal processes and ensure that systems and hardware infrastructures are robust enough to mitigate risk, assure consumer confidence and maximise revenues,” he said.
Some of the key areas targeted in this campaign include: modernizing payment technology through internet, mobile banking and the security challenges and cyber security threats for the banking sector in East Africa. Other topics are combating financial crime by complying with set policies and standards to protect institutions, key elements of a good security plan, cloud and virtualization security threats. (Xinhua)
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