Building cyber resilience for the Financial Services sector with breadth and at scale

Today, we are proud to announce an initiative with the Cross Market Operational Resilience Group (CMORG) to deliver a large-scale cyber crisis exercise to UK financial services firms.

Co-chaired by the Bank of England and UK Finance, CMORG leads sector-wide operational resilience across UK financial services.

As part of their role bringing firms and market participants together to improve sector resilience, any UK financial services organization is invited to exercise the knowledge, skills and judgment of senior decision-makers when faced with an advanced cyber-attack.

You simply need to head here to register for the browser-based exercise using our platform, which can be completed at a time of your choosing and for no cost.

Centered around the cascading issues faced by risk, operations, communications, regulatory and technical teams upon discovering malware inside critical systems, our Cyber Crisis Simulator tests organization-wide decision-making with a number of ‘wicked problems’.

With recent attacks emphasizing the need for testing severe but plausible scenarios, exercising senior-level decision-makers and key services to improve operational resilience is crucial. In regulated industries, honing knowledge, skills and judgment at both a technical and non-technical level will help mitigate financial, reputational, technical and regulatory risk.

Exercising at scale and with a high cadence across geographic locations is equally important in building resilience in depth. Whereas logistically this may previously have been difficult, our platform runs senior teams through the attack narrative in a browser at a time of their choosing, making it a reality for any financial services firm.

The participation of individual firms will not be evaluated. Instead, data will be aggregated, anonymized and fed back to the entire industry through CMORG to improve collective resilience.

Mohit Sarvaiya, EMEA CIO for BNY Mellon, who provided executive sponsorship for the exercise said, “The increasing sophistication and severity of cyber-attacks can debilitate a whole organization. This means a well-practiced response is required from a range of stakeholders, and it is imperative that everyone plays their part.

“This exercise provides a way for financial services companies to better understand crucial decision-making elements such as prioritization and to rehearse processes with the aim of collectively developing resilience and preparedness.”

“There is no better way to do this than with an exercise based on real-world events. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to collect all senior stakeholders together, which is why the Immersive Labs platform is so valuable, making it easier for teams across the board to exercise at scale.”

Any UK Financial Services firm can sign up for the exercise by heading here.