TORONTO – Hackers are targeting Toronto-Dominion Bank’s internal systems at all hours using cutting-edge techniques, but the bank’s head of cybersecurity isn’t losing sleep over them – they work for him, after all.
The bank established late last year an in-house “red team” of ethical hackers _ cybersecurity professionals who attempt to hack a computer network to test or evaluate its security on the owners’ behalf _ who conduct live attacks against its own networks continuously, said Alex Lovinger, TD Bank’s vice-president of cyber threat management.
“We’re doing it exactly how our adversaries would do it… So if we find a weakness or something like that, we can close it or address it before a real attacker,” he said.
Canada’s biggest banks are fortifying their defences by hiring their own ethical hackers to test their systems as the frequency and sophistication of cyberthreats increases.
A Senate report last month entitled “cyber.assault: It should keep you up at night” sounded the alarm about the potential consequences of major cyberattacks in Canada.
“While some progress has been made federally in the past year, there is much more that…
