Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Bank of England partners with Anomali to combat cyber threat after successful trial

13 Feb 2017, 3:39 pm

The Bank of England is to work with cybersecurity company Anomali "to monitor and mitigate efforts against cyber threats" following a successful trial of the business' technology, the Bank has announced.

Testing of Anomali's technology were carried out over a period of two months via the Bank's fintech accelerator. The Bank launched the fintech accelerator in June 2016 a bid to find technology companies to work with on 'proof of concept' projects with the aim of enabling it to "harness fintech innovations for central banking", it said at the time.

According to a case study (2-page / 276KB PDF) published by the Bank, containing details of the testing, Anomali's technology "works to collect, integrate, hunt and investigate cyber security intelligence data in a highly automated fashion, with integrations into existing security tools". The Bank said it found the technology "intuitive" and that it "allowed highly efficient, automated ingestion and sharing of data".

In announcing plans to extend its working relationship with Anomali, the Bank said it is "supportive of solutions that support the sharing of strategic, operational and high quality tactical threat intelligence to achieve an informed and rigorous understanding of the cyber threat landscape across the financial sector", and that cybersecurity is "a key area that the accelerator is examining".

"The Bank sought a solution which would consolidate threat intelligence into a searchable repository that can optimise information collation, enrichment and sharing in support of a proactive, intelligence-led defence strategy," it said. "After running for a period of two months, the proof of concept demonstrated the benefits of applying a combination of established and emerging technologies to threat intelligence knowledge management, improving situational awareness, accelerating the time required to adjust defences and making more efficient use of resources."

In November last year, the Bank's chief operating officer Charlotte Hogg confirmed that proof of concept projects that had been undertaken through the accelerator scheme "covered three main areas – data analytics, information security, and some work exploring distributed ledgers".

Hogg confirmed then that fintech tools that use data to help "identify, protect, detect and respond to cyber threats" had also been explored by the Bank in its accelerator.

The Bank said the fintech accelerator scheme will be to open to new applications this spring.