HSBC ‘being attacked on a regular basis’ by on-line criminals – as boss ‘stored awake at night time’ by cyber risk

The boss of one of many UK’s greatest banks says it’s being attacked “on a regular basis” by on-line criminals and he’s stored up at night time by cyber threats.

“It does preserve me awake,” HSBC UK chief govt Ian Stuart informed the Treasury Committee of MPs.

“As a result of we will be attacked and we’re being attacked on a regular basis.”

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“Cybersecurity is now very a lot on the prime of our agenda,” he added.

Issues had been additionally highlighted by Lloyds Financial institution chief govt Charlie Nunn, who mentioned monetary fraud will worsen if banks can’t intervene to stop it and social media and telecoms firms aren’t incentivised to halt it.

Mr Nunn mentioned the UK “has turn into the house of fraud”, including that the variety of victims is “fairly disturbing” and “particular person circumstances are harrowing”.

Main excessive road companies, together with M&S and the Co-op, have been hit by cyber assaults in current weeks and had their operations impacted.

Cybersecurity threats, nonetheless, weren’t behind the several-day outage at Barclays on the finish of January, its UK chief govt Vim Maru mentioned.

He added: “We have realized the teachings. We’re performing on the teachings, each work completed internally, but additionally with assist from third events as nicely.

Account holders throughout the UK have suffered a spate of IT glitches from completely different banks round paydays this 12 months.

Tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos on IT have been spent and buyer glitches have fallen, Mr Maru mentioned.

He added that the issue at Barclays was a software program difficulty, saying: “We put a repair in place that signifies that we cannot have a recurrence.”