Corvil Says Standards, Collaboration and AI-Powered Automation are Critical to Building Cyber Resilience in Global Financial Markets

As leaders in the trading community gather for the FIX Trading Community, 2018 EMEA Trading Conference, Corvil shines spotlight on cyber risks in algorithmic trading

 

DUBLIN, Ireland, March 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Corvil Director, Security Product Management, Graham Ahearne, is among the cybersecurity panelists at today's FIX Trading Community Annual EMEA Conference, enlisted to address how financial markets can mitigate cyber risk.

While most financial institutions have robust information security solutions and programmes in place, outmaneuvering today's advanced cyber attackers, who have industrialised their tactics, techniques and procedures, remains one of the biggest operating challenges. The risk should not be underestimated with regulators such as Steve Peikin, co-director of the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), warning last year: "The greatest threat to our markets right now is the cyber threat."

Industry associations such as the FIX Trading Community are playing a key role in spearheading standards to mitigate risks. January 2018 saw the release of the FIX-over-TLS (FIXS) standard and guidelines to help users of the FIX protocol meet security requirements. FIXS is part of a larger programme of work that the FIX Trading Community initiated in response to the cybersecurity challenge.

In supporting FIX's cyber initiatives Graham Ahearne says: "The advanced, persistent threat landscape poses an enormous risk to financial markets.  The significance of industry collaboration and knowledge sharing cannot be overstated, which is why events like FIX EMEA conference are critically important."

Trading environments tend to be optimized for one thing: speed. Nowhere else in the world is data moving this fast, in such large volumes, with so much economic value at stake. Performance and speed are paramount, and trading networks do not want additional overhead to weigh them down, which makes adding traditional security systems challenging.

Ahearne says: "There is also a perception, because they are typically segmented from the rest of the enterprise IT infrastructure, that trading environments are safer than others.  With more than 80 percent of breaches^[1] stemming from accidental mishaps or malicious insiders, these environments can become compromised."

While in a normal attack, hackers may need to steal data or install ransomware, in financial markets, hackers only need to slightly tweak an algorithm or impair the performance of the network overall. Electronic trading networks are heavily automated, but they play such a huge role in the stock market at large that a rogue trading algorithm could do significant damage.