Banks are rapidly undertaking digital transformation and building collaborative ecosystem with third parties. Cyber criminals on the other hand are becoming increasingly sophisticated and innovative. The data perimeter has thus extended across channels, networks and partners, expanding the attack surface. These attacks result not only with monetary losses but also damages the reputation of banks and trust of customers. Traditional measures often fail to thwart these attacks, forcing banks to rapidly upgrade their cyber defence.

HDFC Bank is India’s largest private bank by assets and market capitalisation. Sameer Ratolikar, the executive vice president and chief information security officer at HDFC Bank, is an information security expert with over 25 years of experience.

Ratolikar shared the key cyber security concerns the industry faces today and how the HDFC Bank is adopting new technologies to counter these cyber threats.

“The biggest concern today is the emergence of sophisticated malwares. Hackers write new codes such that they can evade the available traditional security controls and exploit the system security vulnerabilities,” pointed Ratolikar.

“Second, with the emergence of the internet of things, the pool of IP addresses has increased. It gives hackers the capacity to launch the distributed denial of services (DDoS) type of attacks that makes the infrastructure unavailable for a longer period of time. They now have capabilities to launch a DDoS data attack worth 1 to 1.5 terabyte which is way bigger than 30-40 Gbps in 2015-2016,” he added. 

The financial services industry has been witnessing increasing incidents of DDoS attack recently. For instance, Lloyd’s Bank was hit by a DDoS in 2017. In 2018, several leading European banks like Santander, Royal Bank of Scotland, Tesco Bank and Bank of Spain were also reportedly attacked.

“The third challenge for all of us is to have a ...

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