Network and Information Security in Finance Sector

ENISA support to the Financial Resilience

The Finance Sector provides a crucial backbone to the European Economy and -like many other sectors- its increasing dependency on ICT infrastructures, providers and their supply chain. The importance of ICT security and resilience supporting the Finance Sector grew considerably and the objective of protecting automated transactions and more generally all types of communications is altogether more critical and complex at the same time.

A stable Financial System in Europe is however, the underlying foundation for Economic stability; and the reliance on IT is now life critical for the entire Sector.

Cooperation between the key actors of the Finance Sector at European level becomes an urgent need as the sector faces stronger and larger scale challenges. The following effects of the current silo approach for the protection of the Financial Market Institutions presents many inconveniences, such as:

The Implementation of a multitude of security and technical standards;
Building trust in Information sharing
Different Incident reporting schemes and lines
Crisis management in the event of a cross-border incidents
Threat intelligence gathering on both strategic and operational level

ENISA EGFI Group is an information exchange platform that brings together experts to ensure security and resilience of the entire Financial Market ecosystem.

Establishing the new Expert Group for Finance (EGFI 2.0)

The creation of the Expert Group on Finance (EGFI) delivers a message that the increase of cooperation, ex-post analyses sharing, mutual-aid strategies, and risk management focus on this new type of threats is the most appropriate answer, and could be altogether a better reaction than improving defences in the Financial Sector.

The objective of this EGFI is therefore to:

Levels

Raise awareness of Finance sector to ICT risks through the engagement of the IT security staff and management of Financial Market Infrastructures
Promote good practices and standards.
Develop security profiles specific to different financial market institutions (e.g. payment processors, banks, etc.).

With the objective of making Financial Sector more secure, ENISA develops information exchange among communities, organises annual studies and workshops, and continuously engages the operational community through the experts group.

Participants to the EGFI 2.0 shall contribute to enhance the current level of cyber security by sharing their expertise on current threats, challenges and solutions

The Call for participation for the new Expert Group was formally launched on 16th January 2019.