The Swift attacks: should you be worried?

SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a messaging network that financial institutions use to securely transmit information and instructions through a standardised system of codes. This is an established and trusted system used by many banks for the payment of funds.

However, the recent spate of reports of actual and perceived cyber threats to banks and other financial institutions - going through the Swift payment system - has raised alarms with widespread repercussions:

As a result, confidence and trust in the Swift payment system has been somewhat shattered, perhaps even irretrievably.

It would be naive to believe that banks are the only affected parties. As a backbone of international banking, the Swift payment system has traditionally been relied upon for its integrity to authenticate and fulfil payments. Anyone who relies on the banking system for any trade and money transfers would inevitably be exposed to …