12/06/2017

Keeping Data Safe

Financial sector launches industry-wide data-protection effort

The Equifax incident earlier this year simply underlined what many in the financial sector already knew: Ignore security issues at your peril.

As a result, the industry is working hard to get in front of the next incident. Its latest attempt, called Sheltered Harbor, hopes to bring together banks, credit unions, and other financial bodies for the goal of sharing information, so in the case of a cyberattack, affectFed industry members can continue to serve customers. As a part of this effort, the group’s more than 400 members are expected to do secure backups of customer data.

While the Equifax breach involved stolen data, Sheltered Harbor works on the assumption that such data could be destroyed in a cyberattack.

“The focus is on really trying to protect the consumers’ access to their assets,” Steve Silberstein, Sheltered Harbor’s CEO, said in comments to Bloomberg. “We have to continue to make the system safer, and it continues to require some amount of sharing and some amount of cooperation to do that.”

Please click here to read the complete article from Associations Now.