Central Bank of the Russian Federation in 2021 held cyber exercises with the participation of 70 banks

2021

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation conducted cyber exercises with the participation of 70 banks

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation in 2021 held cyber exercises with the participation of 70 banks. This was announced in early February 2022 by the representative of the regulator Artem Sychev, who holds the post of first deputy head of the information security department.

According to him, financial organizations of various sizes took part in the events - from small to the largest. At the same time, he did not name the organizations that participated in the pilot project. Sychev noted that cyber exercises were carried out in the form of command and staff stories.

Central Bank of the Russian Federation conducted cyber exercises with the participation of 70 banks

We came across a very simple and unexpected thing that large organizations discovered for themselves. They discovered that during a very simple task of detecting and localizing a problem, they sometimes have no relationship within themselves, the automation department does not interact with the information unit and the rest. And this just suggests that if we are talking about complete digital independence, then this does not rest only on import substitution and only on replacing the software with something. But it also rests on an important internal process of interaction between those who work with these information systems, "said Sychev (quoted by Interfax).

Vadim Uvarov, director of the information security department of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, said in early February 2022 that the Central Bank was going to continue work on organizing cyber exercises of financial organizations and financial associations. She also identified three main vectors at the heart of cybersecurity development:

• protecting the rights of consumers of financial services and enhancing confidence in digital technologies;
• creation of conditions for safe implementation of digital technologies by financial organizations in the credit and financial sphere;
• development of information security risk control, operational reliability for continuity of banking financial services.^[1]

National Cyberpoligon Training

The Bank of Russia will hold exercises at the National Cyberpoligon. Rostelecom-Solar announced this on March 26, 2021.

The purpose of the event is to check the readiness of scenarios developed by the Information Security Department of the Central Bank to identify and repel attacks on the infrastructure of the financial industry in conditions close to real ones.

The national cyberpoligon is being created in Russia as part of the federal project "Information Security" of the national program "Digital Economy of Russia" in response to the threats to cybersecurity that arise during the digital transformation of domestic enterprises and state authorities. The creation of the National Cyberpoligon was entrusted to Rostelecom.

The financial segment of the National Cyberpoligon, which is to be protected by employees, Bank Russia is built using both real equipment and virtual machines emulating servers and working stations. As well as automated attack scenarios, the financial segment was developed taking into account industry specifics. Its infrastructure includes all the elements necessary for the work of a typical creditno financial institution:, automated banking systems systems remote banking services and processing. The infrastructure emulates the business processes characteristics of the bank's activities: electronic correspondence between employees, file exchange, payment processing, currency exchange, account maintenance, etc. For each of the subsystems, scenarios of information security events have been developed, which are based on common attack schemes.

The exercises are designed to develop the technical skills that are needed to detect, prevent and investigate cyber attacks, as well as to improve the interaction processes of IS specialists in responding to information security incidents.

Despite significant progress in cybersecurity, banks they remain an extremely attractive target of attacks for, "says hackersAlexander Chechin, deputy general director of Rostelecom-Solar. - According to ours, to data the credit and financial industry accounts for 20% of all recorded cybercrime. Therefore, the systematic and regular conduct of cyber exercises is a very important component of the cyber stability of the industry.