Most financial services organisations (even the largest ones) have admitted that they do not have the budget to deal with the largest cyber attacks, according to attendees of a recent forum.
Comments made at Ballintrae's first IT Security Forum, held in the UK, suggested that this led to financial services organisations using their resources to buy themselves time in order to minimise the impact of an attack.
The forum has been introduced to give like-minded heads of IT security the opportunity to sit together and discuss key challenges they face within their respective organisations.
A number of well-known financial services organisations, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Bank Corp, have recently been hit by massive scale DDOS attacks with varying degrees of impact.
These attacks are often used to distract the target organisation while attempting to illegally extract large amounts of money from these organisations by the cyber criminals.
Steve Street, founder of Ballintrae, said: "To get an idea of the scale of cyber attacks, the Chinese military has a larger team dedicated to Cyber Security than the entire UK army! All organisations face a persistent and ongoing threat and leading financial services organisations found it very helpful to discuss their challenges at our forum."
Keynote speakers, one who was recently a speaker at Infosec, talked in detail about Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).
Ballintrae, a specialist consultancy focusing on IT Infrastructure within the financial services industry, plans to hold the IT Security Forum's quarterly.
