There were three new but unsuccessful attempts to abuse the Swift financial transfer network this summer, said Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO of Swift. He also announced the company’s plan to impose tighter security controls on its customers. The cyber heist in Bangladesh Bank, which saw the bank losing $81 million by hacking bank systems connected Swift in February, had prompted Swift to improve security around its systems, update the software it provides banks and add new audit and verification tools. The company is planning to make some of the changes mandatory. Leibbrandt spoke about the thwarted attacks during a keynote speech at the Sibos banking conference in Geneva. He said to counter such attacks, Swift will make it mandatory for customers to self-certify their compliance with a set of 16 core security standards from July 2017 and from 1 January 2018 it will also conduct audits.
