Europe’s Financial Forces Launch Cybersecurity Sharing Initiative

A cross-section of European financial powerhouses – including members of the Euro Cyber Resilience Board for pan-European Financial Infrastructures (ECRB), chaired by the European Central Bank (ECB) – have joined forces to launch a sharing initiative for cybersecurity threat information, ECRB announced on Thursday (Feb. 27).

The Cyber Information and Intelligence Sharing Initiative (CIISI-EU) aims to safeguard the financial system by averting and detecting cyberattacks, facilitating data sharing and good practices, and increasing overall awareness of cybersecurity threats.

“This is the first time that major financial infrastructures, Europol and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) have jointly taken steps against cyber risk,” said ECB Executive Board Member and ECRB Chair Fabio Panetta. “We hope this will be an inspiring model for other jurisdictions to tackle one of the biggest threats of our time. Cybercriminals are increasingly stealing money, and therefore sharing information will help us to prevent attacks and ultimately protect people’s money.”

The ECB is working on a framework for the CIISI-EU sharing initiative to inspire other jurisdictions to follow its example.

“Cyber threats pose a serious risk to the stability of the European and global financial system. Cyber threats are borderless and the capabilities of the attackers are constantly evolving, threatening to disrupt the interconnected global financial systems,” according to the ECRB statement.

“To successfully combat cyber risk, financial infrastructures need to actively participate in information and intelligence sharing arrangements and collaborate with trusted stakeholders within the industry as a whole,” it said.

Earlier this month, Mastercard developed a cutting-edge European cybersecurity center for public and private stakeholders to work on advancing regional fortitude. The European Cyber Resilience Centre is a contemporary security unit based at Mastercard’s European headquarters in Waterloo, Belgium. It is intended to support affiliation between public, private and regulatory sectors to support enterprise resilience. The facility, which will serve as a single cybersecurity hub for the region, is the first such center for Mastercard outside of North America.