A combined cyber attack on important banks could trigger financial instability, the head of the European Central Bank has warned.
Christine Lagarde, the ECB’s president, said that a report by the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) estimates the global cost of cyber attacks at between $45bn and $654bn.
“As an operator of critical infrastructures, the ECB obviously takes such threats very seriously,” she said in France on Wednesday evening. She said there were several “plausible channels” through which a cyber attack could morph into a serious financial crisis.
Download the new Independent Premium app Sharing the full story, not just the headlines Download nowMs Lagarde said an operational outage that destroyed or encrypted the balance accounts of a major financial institution could trigger a liquidity crisis. “History shows that liquidity crises can quickly become systemic crises,” she said. “The ECB is well aware that it has a duty to be prepared and to act pre-emptively.”
The report by the ESRB, which was set up by the European Commission, will look how a cyber incident could, under certain circumstances, rapidly escalate from an operational outage to a liquidity crisis.
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