The Group of Seven industrial powers on Tuesday said they had agreed on guidelines for protecting the global financial sector from cyber attacks following a series of cross-border bank thefts by hackers.
Policymakers have grown more worried about financial cybersecurity in the wake of numerous hacks of SWIFT, the global financial messaging system, including an $81 million theft in February from the Bangladeshi central bank's account at the New York Federal Reserve.
"Cyber risks are growing more dangerous and diverse, threatening to disrupt our interconnected global financial systems," according to the guidelines agreed by G7 finance ministers and central bankers.
The guidelines, which officials described as non-binding principles, were in a three-page document posted on the Web pages of G7 government agencies. The G7 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin told reporters in a telephone briefing that G7 officials had surveyed their existing cybersecurity practices and identified potential shortfalls.
A Treasury official later described the shortfalls as a failure to look at cybersecurity from a risk-management perspective.
Cyber thieves have targeted large financial institutions around the world, including America's largest bank JPMorgan, as well as smaller players like Ecuador's Banco del Austro and Vietnam's Tien Phong Bank. The U.S. Federal Reserve's internal security staff detected more than 50 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, with several incidents described as "espionage."
The guidelines released on Tuesday instruct governments to make sure financial regulators are policing the cyber-security readiness of companies and themselves, and that public and private institutions are continually updating their defenses.
The goal of the guidelines was also to get firms and regulators across the world to approach risks the same way, according to the Treasuryofficial.
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