British Banks Play Cyber War Games To Protect Themselves From Future Attacks From Hackers And Groups Like Anonymous And The Syrian Electronic Army

As cyber hacking continues to be a major problem for media outlets, high profile twitter accounts (including President Obama’s) and even the government websites, banks have taken actions to protect themselves in the event of an attack.

After years of attacks from groups like Anonymous and The Free Syrian Army, many institutions have increased their cyber security to ensure that attacks like denial of service (DOS) attacks don’t interrupt their service.

On Monday, British banks will act out a war games scenario, reacting to attacks from online threats in a replay of the 2011 event, “Waking Shark”. This year’s event dubbed, “Waking Shark II” bring together 100 people from more than 30 organizations from all across the financial industry and infrastructure providers. Cyber experts from the Serious Organized Crime Squad Agency (SOCA), the Cyber Security Operations Center (CSOC), O2, BT and the Payments Council.

The exercise will test how well banking infrastructure, including ATMs and wholesale markets liquidity perform when under attack and how well all the groups involved communicate.

The UK often conducts war games to assess the readiness in the event of freak weather, transport issues and other major disruptions.

New York recently ran a similar test called Quantum Dawn 2. Reports from the test suggested that new York could make improvements in areas including “sector-wide incident command structure and processes, systemic risk assessment and decision process, and communication and information sharing,” explained the report.

Just two months ago Barclays reported having 1.3 million pounds ($2.07 million) stolen by hackers. Eight were arrested in relation to the offence. It was also reported in September that millions of dollars had been taken from a Santander account after a computer was taken over remotely.