The world’s biggest economies will pledge to jointly fight cyber attacks on the global banking system, one of the biggest co-ordinated efforts yet to protect lenders since an $81mn heist of the Bangladesh central bank’s account last year.
Meeting in the German resort town of Baden-Baden, G20 finance chiefs will agree to fight attacks regardless of their origin and promise cross-border co-operation to maintain financial stability, according to a draft document seen by Reuters.
“We will promote the resilience of financial services and institutions in G20 jurisdictions against malicious use of information and communication technologies, including from countries outside the G20,” it said.
However, it dropped an earlier reference for enhanced security requirements for financial services.
Cyber crime became a top priority after an elaborate heist on the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, an unprecedented theft that exposed the vulnerabilities of the system.
The agreement, set to be finalised today, will come just days after the United States charged two intelligence agents from Russia, another G20 member, with masterminding the 2014 theft of 500mn Yahoo accounts.
The indictment was the first time US authorities have criminally charged Russian spies for cyber offences including for computer fraud, economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and wire fraud.
The charges came amid a swirl of controversies relating to alleged Kremlin-backed hacking of the 2016 US presidential election and possible links between Russian figures and associates of US President Donald Trump.
In the banking world, attacks through the global SWIFT bank transfer system have continued to increase with the network recording a “meaningful” number of attacks with about a fifth of them resulting in stolen funds since the Bangladesh heist, the firm said late last year.
In other highly publicised attacks, retailer Tesco Plc’s banking arm said £2.5mn ($3mn) had been stolen from 9,000 customers last year while hackers also stole more than 2bn roubles ($34mn) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank and from accounts in commercial banks.
The European Union is considering testing banks’ defences against cyber attacks with concerns growing about the industry’s vulnerability to hacking.
The world’s financial leaders will renounce competitive devaluations and warn against exchange rate volatility, but are likely to struggle to find common ground on trade and financing against climate change.
The difficulty stems from a major shift in the views of the United States, where the new Trump administration is considering protectionist trade measures to curb imports and considers efforts to try to halt global warming a “waste of money”.
A draft of the statement showed that, for now, the issue of trade and protectionism is not mentioned at all.
This breaks with a decade-old tradition of the G20 endorsing free trade and rejecting protectionism.
“It’s about the right wording, it’s about the openness of the world trade systems in the final communique,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said before talks began.
US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday in Berlin that the Trump administration had no desire to get into trade wars, but certain trade relationships need to be re-examined to make them fairer for US workers.
G20 officials said the United States was ready to accept a phrase backing “free and fair” trade, given that the meaning of “fair” was open to interpretation.
Europe was keen on adding that trade should be “rules-based”, meaning subject to rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Related Story