Are We At Risk Of An “Armageddon-type Cyber Event”?

Benjamin Lawsky, the New York State Department of Financial Services chief, has decided he needs to shake things up a little if he wants financial executives to take cyber attacks seriously.

“I worry that we’re going to have some sort of major cyber event in the financial system that’s going to cause us all to shudder, an Armageddon-type cyber event,” Lawsky said at the Bloomberg Link Most Influential Summit, according to a report from The Guardian. It would be “something that causes a blip in the financial system for a period of time” and added “the failures to detect the 9/11 plot were sort of a failure of imagination, some would say. I worry about the same thing here: that an event will happen and we’ll all look back at it and say, ‘How did we not do more?’”

Lawsky said he wants to take “concrete actions” with banks, including a possible “cyber insurance fund that would help banks cover some liability if they step up their online security. There is a current private market for such insurance, but it is so small as to be negligible.”