Wall Street studies pandemic readiness

Wall Street tests readiness for hackers and

pandemic

By Tracy Alloway in New York

Wall Street is to test its defences against a deadly pandemic as the financial services sector takes part in a series of simulated exercises to prepare for a new wave of global threats.

Banks, broker dealers and asset managers will be asked to show how they would continue to function if up to 30 per cent of their staff were unable to work due to the H7N9 bird flu virus or the MERS coronavirus that has been circulating in the Middle East. Government bodies including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the US Department of Health and Human Services will also take part.

The activity is scheduled for November and will be co-ordinated by the same industry body spearheading a cyber attack simulation on Thursday, which will test how banks deal with a co-ordinated wave of computer hacking. Known as Quantum Dawn 2, the exercise will involve about 50 financial companies and government bodies.

The two simulations underscore the new threats facing big financial institutions, which have been expanding their reliance on technology even as concerns over cyber security have increased. A report released earlier this week showed that half of the world’s securities exchanges had repelled cyber attacks over the past few years.

“These are risks that we’re seeing, so we want to make sure we’re practised and ready,” said Karl Schimmeck, vice-president of financial services operations at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the industry group.

It has been about six years since Wall Street underwent a pandemic stress test and a year and a half since the first Quantum Dawn exercise, said Mr Schimmeck, a former US marine. The earlier cyber drill, organised by the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council, attracted only half as many participants.

Mr Schimmeck said the financial industry had since experienced a large number of so-called denial-of-service attacks, a type of computer hacking in which programmers take down a website’s servers by overloading them with information requests.

Government agencies including the US Treasury, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security are participating in the war game-like Quantum Dawn 2.

Mr Schimmeck declined to give an exact specification of the threat involved in the drill, but said it would replicate “a widespread systemic cyber attack in the US equities market”. Financial staff will stay in their offices to identify and fend off the simulated onslaught.

Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will report the results of the simulation. “It’s not a pass-fail result,” Mr Schimmeck said.

Thursday’s cyber security drill will run from 9am to 2.30pm in New York, while the pandemic exercise is scheduled to take place over three days in mid-November.

“We’re trying to be proactive. It’s something we haven’t tested as a sector for a good amount of time,” Mr Schimmeck said. “For a lot of the banks, their footprints have changed dramatically over the past few years and so have their headcounts.”

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