New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India has put all banks on alert amid tip-offs received by the regulator on possible cyberattacks.
"In the light of credible threat intelligence received regarding potential cyberattacks, regulated entities are advised to put in place enhanced state of surveillance and resilience capabilities to guard against these threats," read an advisory issued by the RBI on June 24.
With digital banking at the forefront of financial transactions in the country, the banks will have to ensure heightened security, including continuously monitoring network activities and server logs to detect malicious activity.
Banks offer varied digital payments systems these days including UPI, NEFT, RTGS, and SWIFT (for international fund transfers) apart from card payments, and as such, all financial institutions are expected to take extra precautions to secure these and other modes of transaction.
Earlier this year, the RBI, in one of its reports, revealed that the country's financial sector faced more than 13 lakh cyber-attacks between January and October 2023. Among other things, the report pointed out that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cyberattack and availability of “as a service” offerings for cybercrime have added to the efficiency of attack vectors and to the scale of looming cyber threats.
"Inter-connections among financial institutions, common and high degree of dependencies from third party service providers, volume, and speed of transactions due to increased adoption of application programming interfaces (APIs) and innovative and invasive technologies are some of the major factors that make the impact from cyberattacks a plausible scenario from a systemic perspective," the report added.
Cyber risk, a key component of institutional risk, increased marginally and moved up to the ‘high’ risk category, the report stated.
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