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.