The British Government Is Going to Help Big Banks Fight Cybercrime

With high-profile hacking attacks on banks making the news, and mountains of credit card details continuously being leaked, the UK financial sector is teaming up with the government to fight the joint enemy of cybercrime.

The British Bankers' Association (BBA) announced that it will launch a new service that will give banks "real-time" updates on threats to their security. Dubbed the Financial Crime Alerts Service (FCAS), the program will get its information directly from law enforcement and government databases.

These will include the National Crime Agency (essentially the UK's version of the FBI), and 11 other agencies. The move signals a greater degree of collaboration between the public and the private sector when it comes to cybercrime.

This toes the line of the UK Cyber Security Strategy. The government initiative includes objectives such as "tackling cyber crime and making the UK one of the most secure places in the world to do business in cyberspace." But the government alone can't make business secure; it needs the private companies to play ball.

In a 2011 document, a stated goal of the strategy was that "more resources will go into working with the private sector and our international cyberspace partners."

In the announcement, Donald Toon, Director of the Economic Crime Command at the National Crime Agency, said he thought a closer relationship between those who monitor crime and those who may fall victim to it was a critical part of reducing the damage done overall.

"Collaboration between law enforcement and the private sector is key to reducing the impact of economic crime," he said. "Alerts to industry are a key part of this and I welcome the BBA's work in this area."

This is presumably because the more agencies can warn potential victims in advance of a breach, the greater steps can be taken to minimise the impact of a crime.

Executives of the British Banking Association (BBA) include former senior bankers as well as ex-government advisors, and the FCAS system is all being put together by BAE Systems Applied Intelligence, which has a history of both protecting financial systems and working with police forces.

Once it goes live in 2015, the FCAS system will provide warnings on areas such as money laundering, "cyber and e-crime," and fraud, plus information on emerging trends. It will also attempt to tackle terrorist financing, which banks have obligations not to partake in. Described by the BBA as a "portal," FCAS will give updates to its users in "real-time," although no technical details were included in the released statement.

Anthony Browne, the Chief Executive of the BBA said that, "Receiving real-time alerts from such domestic and international bodies, including the National Crime Agency and 11 other government and law enforcement agencies, will be vital intelligence for the army of staff banks have already hired to combat these threats."

Browne emphasised the safety that the service will bring to end-user bank customers too. "This service is a shining example of how banks and government can work together to benefit all customers."

It's not the first time banks and government have pooled their intelligence. Earlier this year, the Bank of England introduced a system called CBEST that uses information from both the government and security companies. However, CBEST doesn't give live updates; it just replicates known cyber-attacks in order to test a bank's defenses; a sort of bank-wide security audit.

The announcement of the FCAS also comes 24 hours after Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) signaled that it had reached a deal with the European Banking Federation (EBF), a collection of 4,500 banks in all, to "intensify cooperation between law enforcement and the financial sector," as reported by SC Magazine.

It makes sense that a closer partnership between government agencies and the financial sector will result in greater cybersecurity overall, and that benefits both sides: Businesses get better protections for their own assets and customers, and the country therefore becomes more attractive to lucrative investors.