Financial crimes will occur whenever there is money to be made and for sure criminals and hackers alike will use their best endeavours to penetrate the defence of the cyber world to rob or steal. The strength of the cyber world also lies its main weakness. Hackers can choose to attack customers and financial firms any time and anywhere because the virtual world is highly interconnected. Cyber attacks can take many different forms. A frequently used method is to make phishing attempts to trick customers into divulging their account information and passwords, or to plant malwares into customers’ computers and mobile phones to steal their access credentials. Then the hackers transfer moneys from the victims’ accounts. Sometimes the hackers would do something unusual, such as the recent example in  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Hong Kong in which some customers’ bank accounts had been used by hackers to conduct unauthorized stock trading without stealing money from the victims’ accounts. At the bank level, the usual form of attacks would be Distributed Denial of Services (DdoS), whether they are motivated by blackmail, revenge or activism of some sort. There is a worrying trend that this form of attacks is rising very fast in recent years. Cybersecurity fortification initiative 4. Rather than harbouring the hope that you are lucky enough not to be targeted, it is more prudent and productive to take the necessary pre-emptive steps to protect yourself or your customers from cyber attacks.
Suitable arrangements will also be introduced to ensure that relevant or equivalent experience and expertise in the cybersecurity field will be appropriately recognized. Cyber intelligence sharing platform 8. Last but not least, the third pillar of the CFI is to develop a new piece of infrastructure for the purpose of sharing intelligence on cyber attacks. Just like any conventional warfare, intelligence is the key to success. While individual banks can develop their own intelligence network, the coverage of such intelligence and the timeliness of receiving cyber attack alerts may at times be limited. At the same time, the entry barriers for launching cyber attacks, in terms of costs and the hardware and techniques required, have become much lower. The speed in which hackers may launch cyber attacks, which may well be targeting at not just one bank but several banks at the same time, has greatly increased. So it will be of great help if the banks could collaborate by proactively sharing information and intelligence of cyber attacks or the imminent threats of such attacks. The timeliness of receiving alerts or warnings from a commonly shared intelligence platform will be of immense help for banks to prepare for cyber attacks even before they are launched. 9. I am pleased to announce that the HKMA, in collaboration with The Hong Kong Association of Banks (HKAB) and ASTRI, is going to launch a Cyber Intelligence Sharing Platform, with access open to all the licensed banks in Hong Kong.