Stay tuned with CashEssentials news ! - beyond payments
By subscribing, you accept our Privacy Policy.
×
×

Sheltered Harbor, or US bank readiness for a cyberattack

Categories : Cash is a contingency and fall-back solution, Cash is trust
December 11, 2017
Tags : ATM, ATM forecasting, Cybercriminality, Data breach, Disaster, US
A consortium of banks and credit unions in the US have joined forces creating Sheltered Harbor - a project to better prepare in the event of a cyberattack. It might be time to look into the management of cash supplies in the event of a disaster.
Communication Team / Equipo de Comunicación

A country-wide cyber-attack or a natural disaster is real threat to any government – and financial institutions are aware of this. Indeed, to avoid being taken by surprise, a consortium of US banks and credit unions have joined forces launching a project this year called Sheltered Harbor.

Members of the consortium have committed to backing up customer data on a regular basis to be ready in the event of an attack. Unfortunately, the initiative’s post-disaster solutions do not include ensuring that the cash supply chain is also disaster-resilient, and wrongly so. Indeed, even the most recent hurricane disasters have proven how important it is to have access to cash. Each citizen could of course make sure to store a stack of cash, but disasters are often the least of our worries.

Fortunately, the US Federal Reserve Bank encourages commercial banks to maintain a stockpile of cash in case of a disaster, but there is no generalised strategy applied by financial institutions. The logistics – as well as the risks of having an ATM with too much cash – can of course be complicated to manage, but this can be a legitimate topic for discussion in the framework of overall bank disaster preparedness, especially in the United States where the 2017 string of hurricanes resulted in an important shortage of liquidity.   

To read the original article, please click here.

Related