Reserve Bank faces hacker attack each two seconds

Hackers are continuously testing the central bank’s security, with seven in ten emails deemed malicious.

The endeavours of hackers to gain access to RBA systems have led to a surge in suspicious emails.

The Reserve Bank is regularly fending off cyber security threats, with potential hackers testing the resiliency of its systems every two seconds, according to the central bank’s technology chief.

Sarv Girn, chief information officer at the RBA, told delegates at the Gartner Symposium on the Gold Coast the central bank was withstanding a barrage of potential attacks, in a speech outlining the broad technological challenges confronting organisations.

“In this era cyber security is an inherent dimension of operational resilience. It’s something that can stop you in the race and needs more attention than ever before,” he said.

“We place a lot of importance in this so that appropriate defences can be established as the threats change.”

His comments follow eight months after hackers funnelled around $135 million from the Bangladeshi central bank.

That scandal forced the departure of the bank’s chief and was pinned on malware developed in North Korea and Pakistan.

The RBA is desperate to quell such cyber security threats, which are commonplace in today’s society.

“Our external perimeter like most other organisations, is faced with a barrage of scans and probes; in fact we have one probe every two seconds,” Mr Girn said.

“Metrics such as this serve to understand the risks to our environment so that pragmatic cost-effective mitigating controls can be established.”

The endeavours of hackers to gain access to RBA systems have led to a surge in suspicious emails, with around 70 per cent of the emails received by the RBA “malicious in nature”.

It follows on from the moderate success of a phishing scam in November 2011 that saw six RBA staff click on a malicious link, although the issue was defused without the leaking of sensitive information.

The central bank was also hit by a denial of service attack in November 2013, with Indonesian hackers taking credit for the actions that also impacted the Australian Federal Police.

Mr Girn added IT reliability had become increasingly vital, with a failure to protect core operations placing entire businesses at risk.

“Whilst attaining digital reliability has been a crucial need for many years, the impact and consequence of getting this wrong in today’s economy can threaten the very viability of an organisation,” he said.

“Your risk appetite statement has to recognise the risks ... and the extent to which they are acceptable.”