Experts call for protecting national critical infra entities from cyber attacks on priority

With new dimension of privacy and compliance coming to the fore, cybersecurity experts Tuesday emphasised on initiating steps to protect organisations of national critical infrastructure, including capital market eco-system, from possible online attacks.

Global and local cybersecurity practitioners discussed and analysed the ramifications of the possible cybersecurity attacks on the financial and capital markets eco-system, and emphasised on building the required resilience in the National Critical Infrastructure (NCI) organisations in the overall capital market segment, to help combat and withstand them.

The experts were speaking at NSE Future Tech 2018 event here.

Collective and well-collaborated effort by strongly interlinked capital market eco-systems -- comprising of exchange platforms, trading, depository and clearing members -- and striking a fine balance in financial costs to successfully thwart them, in an era of data privacy and compliance, have emerged as the key twin challenges before in mitigating cybersecurity.

Speaking on the occasion, Vikram Limaye, MD and CEO at NSE said, "It is our responsibility to set the standards and the FutureTech series is one of the many initiatives taken up by NSE to bring about the change through talent empowerment and investment in innovation.

"Our focus is on building resiliency and security to ensure that the capital markets and its constituents are able to provide the services that they are intended for," he added.

In this context that the capital market eco-system is considered as one of the important segment in the NCI of any economy and rendering it vulnerable and susceptible to cyber breaches or security threats would damage and impair the economic and social fabric of the nations.

A typical exchange platform has a fully-integrated capital market infrastructure comprising listings, trading, clearing and settlement, indices, market data feeds, technology solutions and financial education offerings and any of the individual segment getting impacted by the cyberattack would potentially upset the financial, economic and even social fabric of countries.