Bangladesh Bank (BB) has advised all concerned to strengthen cyber security and adopt the best practice measure to check cybercrime in the country’s financial sector, reports BSS.

In a circular issued on Thursday, the central bank said with increasing digitisation and automation of the financial sector, cyber security threats have increased in sophistication with organised crime and state-level actors deploying targeted attacks.

‘Bangladesh remains vulnerable to cyber-attacks because traditional cyber defences such as anti-virus software and firewalls are proving ineffective against new threat vectors such as zero-day malware and Advance Persistent Threats (APT)’, BB said.

It cautioned that such attacks could cause financial loss and reputational risk, with threat actors evolving from independent individual hackers to sophisticated and well-resourced crime syndicates.

‘In this changing context, Bangladesh Bank is advising all entities in the financial sector to strengthen their cyber security posture and adopt best practice measures’, the central bank suggested.

It also referred to some of the best practices that banks and all other entities in the financial sector could follow. These are: establishing cyber security governance with visibility at the board level, conducting comprehensive cyber security risk and technical gap assessments, establishing a vulnerability management programme, arranging cyber security awareness programmes and trainings for all employees, launching 24-hour information security operations center for monitoring and incident management, developing an incident response plan and managing vendor risks for outsourced services.

For credit card services, BB suggested introducing Payment Card Industry-Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) certification and chip-based cards for a higher level of security.