Britain steps up fight against cyber crimes

The Bank of England sought to bolster the financial industry's defences against cyberattacks when it announced a new framework to spot and test possible weak points at lenders.

The central bank says hacking represents a growing risk for the financial system, which handles money for millions of customers and companies in Britain.

Called CBEST, the new framework would use information from government and vetted commercial sources to identify potential attackers, it said.

The framework then replicates the techniques used by hackers to devise a test to see how successful an attack on a company might be and whether it is resilient enough to resist it.

"The results should provide a direct readout on a firm's capability to withstand cyberattacks that on the basis of current intelligence have the most potential, combining probability and impact, to have an adverse impact on financial stability," Andrew Gracie, the Bank of England's executive director of resolution, told a meeting of the British Bankers' Association.

"Low-level attacks are now not isolated events but continuous. Unlike physical attacks that are localised, these attacks are international and know no boundaries."