The Fraud Blog with Tracy Kitten

Curbing Cross-Border Cybercrime

Public-Private Partnerships Hot Topic at Fraud Summits

How can banking institutions battle the global interconnections of fraud? What steps does the international financial community need to take to ensure barriers that bar information sharing across borders are responsibly broken down?

See Also: How to Take the Complexity Out of Cybersecurity

Both questions cropped up last week during Information Security Media Group's Fraud Summit in Toronto. That one-day summit, held Sept. 17, kicked off a series of international and domestic events we're hosting over the next several weeks.

Now, as I head to our London Fraud Summit on Sept. 23, I expect similar questions will be asked there.

Cybersecurity concerns, fuelled by our global interconnectedness, will be fundamental themes in London, just as they were in Toronto.

And it makes sense. We all appreciate how our global economy is being threatened. Without more cooperation among governments, international law enforcement and international banking institutions, the growth of cross-border crime rings will continue.

The U.S. Connection

In the U.S., we've had similar discussions about the need for more international collaboration and a stronger domestic focus on information sharing.

Collaborative efforts within the U.S. gained ground in late 2012 and early 2013, in the wake the of the continuous distributed-denial-of-service attacks that took aim at some of the country's leading banks.

While the banking industry struggled to put a face on the hacktivists behind those attacks, it shored up defenses on the back-end with an intense focus on the informational exchange of attack vectors, attack tactics and mitigation strategies. The effort proved successful.

Globally, as we continue to see DDoS strikes and other cyber-attacks waged against the payments industry and other critical-infrastructure sectors, we realize information sharing is a necessity.

Working with Law Enforcement

At the Toronto Fraud Summit, Mark Sullivan, director of fraud programs for the Interac Association, described how banks in Canada have made significant strides toward working more collaboratively with law enforcement.

Interac - as Canada's central payments processor and network for electronic financial transactions - is in a unique position. All banks in the country are members, so information sharing among the banks is relatively easy.

But Interac and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are paving the way for enhanced collaboration between law enforcement and financial services as well.

Through a coordinated information-sharing initiative known as the Private Sector Liaison Committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, Interac and the RCMP meet regularly to share details about emerging fraud and cybercrime trends each sees.

Looking Ahead to London

A similar type of collaborative relationship also exists in London, through the LINK Scheme. LINK is the United Kingdom's sole ATM network, and every bank, building society and independent ATM deployer in the U.K. is a member.

I recently spoke with Graham Mott, director of the LINK Scheme and a speaker at our London Fraud Summit. LINK, like Interac, is in a good position to share critical information about emerging ATM fraud trends and attacks.

Mott sums up the fraud landscape this way: "We live in an international age. Crimes cross borders. Criminals are always looking for new techniques. So, it's not the criminal who is migrating; it's the technique that is migrating."

Mott expects the need for more cross-border crime-fighting to be a focal point at our London event, just as it was in Toronto.

For more information about the latest in our ongoing series of fraud summits, and for registration details, visit the ISMG Fraud Summit London webpage.

I'm looking forward to learning how anti-fraud persectives in the U.K. compare to Canada and the U.S. I also want to learn more about inroads made on the cyber-intelligence front since the Financial Services Sharing and Analysis Center established a presence in the U.K. two years ago.

So what fraud-fighting topics are top of mind for you? Post a comment below, and let me know about what you'd like to learn more about.



About the Author

Tracy Kitten

Tracy Kitten

Former Director of Global Events Content and Executive Editor, BankInfoSecurity & CUInfoSecurity

Kitten was director of global events content and an executive editor at ISMG. A veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience, she covered the financial sector for over 10 years. Before joining Information Security Media Group in 2010, she covered the financial self-service industry as the senior editor of ATMmarketplace, part of Networld Media. Kitten has been a regular speaker at domestic and international conferences, and was the keynote at ATMIA's U.S. and Canadian conferences in 2009. She has been quoted by CNN.com, ABC News, Bankrate.com and MSN Money.




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