adminin Ghana, but could not back up her claim with statistics.
“There are very professional hackers in the sub-region who are only waiting for the banks and financial institutions to open up the use of their IT platforms for more enhanced transactions for them to strike at their systems,” Gordon said.
She urged banks in Ghana and the entire West African region to put in some level of security measures in their IT operations in order to thwart any threats to their funds by cyber crime pepertrators.
Gordon said there was still more room for improvement by local financial institutions before urging the banks to ensure that they created a clear distinction between their security personnel from IT team.
The Bank of Ghana and the National Communications Authority (NCA) are presently taking pragmatic steps to finalise regulations that will govern the use of mobile money to the levels that can be comparable to what pertains in Africa’s most developed technology nation of Kenya.
The process has taken off with a couple of mobile phone companies and the banks undertaking mobile money operations, it is still widely believed that there was a great need for banks to come up with strong regulations. This would strengthen their IT systems and make the operations very safe and secured.
However, Gordon expressed fears that if the right security systems were not put in place, the full roll of mobile money in the country would expose customers of various mobile networks to serious risks citing the sophistication of the fraudsters and hackers.
Gordon exclusively told CAJ News that: “Mobile phones including the smartphones we have today can easily be hacked into by these persons and all the information one has can be stolen”. She said when a website or network got attacked, the blame falls on the owners.
“It is their responsibility to ensure that any service or application that they are running is protected against any form of vulnerability,” said Gordon.
She said the onus was with local banks to protect customers and employees from having their financial or private information from being stolen, both in industry or government arguing that the financial institutions should implement regulations with the intent of securing against common hacking attacks.
She said in order to combat the cybercrime, credit card fraud, the payment card industry should create the Data Security Standard that required merchants who process credit cards to take specific measures that helped protect against hacking attacks.
Gordon cited examples of the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada as good examples for banks and mobile networks that have instituted privacy acts meant to regulate how businesses should protect their customer and data of employees.
Gordon identified the lack of continuous training to equip other managers including the human resource managers of the banks with IT knowledge to be able to work hand in hand with those who have been engaged by to work in the IT departments.
Gordon called for what she described as a systematic training for all staff, irrespective of the department.
She said as people progress in a bank, there should be systematic training on some aspects of IT issues. — CAJ News.
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