When looking at the topic of this research note, there are two major aspects to look at. One is about “critical infrastructures”; the other is about “the age of cyber attacks”. We’re looking at critical infrastructures in finance industry. However, this is at least to some degree also about finance industry as a critical infrastructure. The finance industry in its role as one of the backbones of the economy and of entire states is a critical infrastructure. If critical infrastructure within the finance industry becomes attacked, this imposes a massive risk on the financial backbone of in worst case the world’s economy – especially in these days of financial and economic turmoil.
Talking about the age of cyber attacks is about using a strong term. One should be careful with terms like “age”. However, when looking at the different reports on the detected cyber attacks, all of them show a clear tendency: There are more severe attacks. Even while some show that specific types of incidents like spam mails might decrease for some period of time, the number of severe attacks is increasing.
