CYBERSECURITY
A CONCERTED EFFORT The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) has recently launched a Cyber Threat Intelligence Platform to help firms in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) implement appropriate safeguards to mitigate against cyber risks. We sit down with Bryan Stirewalt, CEO of DFSA and Nicolai Solling, Chief Technology Officer at Help AG, for more information on this new platform
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an you tell us more about the cyberthreat intelligence platform? What role does DIFC play in the day to day operations of this platform and how does Help AG contribute to that?
There is a number of risks that the financial services industry and regulators face right now which are not traditional risks. Cyberthreat is one of them and so is climate change—these new risks being the third non-traditional also mean that the approach regulators take to address them should also be non-traditional. Currently, what we are seeing in both cyberthreat and climate change is that the best way to tackle these issues is through a private-public partnership (PPP). A single rule or regulation change in our laws does not address the problem. There is no real silver bullet to these issues, there are a lot of bullets that you can throw at the problem but not one of them works by itself.
The PPP we have with HELP AG and the financial services industry itself is the best solution in dealing with cyberthreats in a holistic fashion. There is a number of elements to this solution if you approach it from a high perspective, think of it as an exchange platform. The solution operates in the same way you exchange stocks and bonds in an environment, we exchange threat intelligence for example if a member company knows about a potential threat in their environment we would be able to exchange that data with other participants on that specific system. The DFSA has been negotiating with the industry so that the platform is able to deliver value to the participants immediately otherwise you will only be seeing what is happening for these 500 organisations but there is a number of vendors such as Kaspersky, Palo Alto Networks, Cofense and Recorded Future they are participants on the platform.
What kind of data do DIFC companies provide on this platform?
The PPP between the DFSA, Help AG and the industry is an attempt to create a holistic approach in dealing with cyberthreats.
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BANKER MIDDLE EAST | APRIL 2020 | ISSUE 229
Financial institutions in the DIFC face the same cyberthreats as those that are faced around the world. The future of finance and other industries revolve around data. How you obtain data, how you store data, how you protect data, how you use data and how you delete data. Cybercriminals know that some companies are rich in data especially those within the financial services industry
