No.18 - Cyber resilience for business continuity in the financial system

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by Boris Giannetto and Antonino FazioMarch 2022

This paper presents initiatives and measures to foster cyber resilience for business continuity in the financial system.(1)

Threats are increasingly varied and hybrid:(2) cyber and natural events,(3) fires, epidemics and pandemics, geopolitical tensions, terrorist attacks and other phenomena.

Since several interconnections characterize the financial sector, it is important to intervene quickly to prevent and contain cyber threats: an event in a single infrastructure, if not promptly addressed, can rapidly spread to the entire system, with chain reaction effects. Furthermore, the diffusion of digital technologies has been widening the attack surface of systems exposed to cyber events.

In this context, cyber resilience is a central tool for preventing and managing events that can affect business continuity in the financial system.

After describing developments in the external context (chapters 1, 2 and 3), this paper outlines key institutional initiatives launched at the national (chapter 4) and international (chapter 5) level to strengthen cyber resilience in the financial system, including ad hoc measures adopted over time by the Bank of Italy (BDI). Evolutionary issues are then addressed (chapters 6 and 7), before moving on to the conclusions.

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1. This text is the English version of a paper published in Italian on the institutional website of the Bank of Italy on 9 March 2022. The views expressed here are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Italy. After the publication of the present paper in Italian, the EU Commission launched on 16 March 2022 an EU public consultation on a forthcoming "European Cyber Resilience Act".

2. For a definition of hybrid threat, see EU Commission, Industry and Defence Space: 'Hybrid threat - state or non-state actors seek to exploit the vulnerabilities of the EU to their own advantage by using in a coordinated way a mixture of measures (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, technological) while remaining below the threshold of formal warfare'.

3. A cyber event is 'Any observable occurrence in an information system. Cyber events sometimes provide indication that a cyber incident is occurring'. Source, the Financial Stability Board's Cyber Lexicon.

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