'There will be accidents ... in the cloud,' ECB warns

A senior official at the European Central Bank warned that banks embracing external data storage and other digital technology need to face an uncomfortable truth: there’s a good chance they’ll get hacked.

“There will be accidents, especially in the cloud,” Korbinian Ibel, a director general at the ECB’s supervisory arm, said in an interview. “It’s not that clouds are more vulnerable, they’re actually often better protected than in-house systems, but they’re seen as juicy targets.”

So far, Europe has been spared the kind of hack that hit Capital One Financial, which said last month that data from about 100 million people in the U.S. was illegally accessed. That may change as the region’s banks face increasing pressure to reduce costs with new technology and make up for the squeeze on revenue from lower interest rates.

ECB shuts down one of its websites after hacker attack

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Central Bank (ECB) shut down one of its websites on Thursday after it was hacked and infected with malicious software.

The ECB said no market-sensitive data had been compromised during the attack on its Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD), which it uses to provide bankers with information on how to produce statistical and supervisory reports.

But it added malware had been injected on the server hosting the site, adding that the email addresses, names and titles of the subscribers of the BIRD newsletter might have been stolen.

Banking on Security: Keeping Data Secure in Financial Services

The protection of sensitive data in line with regulations, both for banks and other financial services organisations, is currently a big challenge. The way these organisations operate has changed dramatically in recent years, due mostly to the fact that financial institutions are not only heavily regulated by data privacy requirements, but they are also under mounting pressure to be open to consumers and businesses about how they are protecting their data from potential breaches.

The increasing expectations of consumers means that banks and financial institutions are trying to achieve a balancing act: how can they protect data privacy, while at the same time remaining transparent about how data is being protected? However, it doesn’t have to be a play-off between meeting these customer expectations and meeting cyber security and compliance requirements: banks and financial services organisations can utilise technology to the fullest extent while still protecting data. 

How the Accused Capital One Hacker Stole Reams of Data From the Cloud

The woman who allegedly pulled off one of the largest-ever bank-data heists appeared to have exploited a vulnerability in the cloud that security experts have warned about for years.

Paige A. Thompson, a former employee at Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -1.73% ’s cloud-computing unit who was arrested Monday, is accused of carrying out the massive theft of 106 million Capital One Financial Corp. COF -1.16% records.