SIFMA Reports That Firms Are Better Prepared for Cyber Attacks

SIFMA summarized key findings from the Quantum Dawn 3 cybersecurity exercise held on September 16, 2015.

In an effort to help companies learn to prepare for systemic cyber attacks, SIFMA published an "After-Action" report, in which it highlighted a number of positive developments, including:

• institutions were able to identify and leverage internal and external capabilities when responding to market-wide cyber attacks;

• more than 80 organizations built "muscle memory" into their crisis response by exercising distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, domain-name-system attack coordination and data breach assessment and communication;

• institutions, along with the Financial Services Information and Analysis Center ("FS-ISAC"), the FBI and regulatory agencies, enhanced their working relationships and exercised the kind of public/private partnership that will be required to respond to a large-scale attack;

• the FS-ISAC and the FBI indicated that they were engaged by organizations appropriately and were active participants in information sharing during the exercise; and

• the exercise demonstrated the critical importance of information sharing in responding to a cyber attack, and the value of putting established and regularly utilized processes into place before a crisis.