YEKATERINBURG, February 14. /TASS/. Russian banks manage to refund less than 10% of the money cyber scammers steal from citizens’ accounts, head of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, said at the Cybersecurity in Finance forum.
"Of course, we see that the share of refunds to people who were victims of cyber fraud has increased. But the exact figures - it was 4.4%, now it is 8.7%. Less than 10% of the funds are refunded to people, so this figure is still quite low. The number of successfully repelled attacks by banks has increased, but the number of successful attacks has also increased - almost 1.2 million transactions without client consent. So, we see that the long-awaited turning point we talked about did not happen," she said.
Nabiullina noted that the threat to cybersecurity will only increase, so the authorities need to re-evaluate how they protect people from cyber crime.
"We are all well aware that the cybersecurity threat will only grow, and this is not something far from the business processes that exist in financial intuitions. Therefore, we need to gradually change our thinking here, our approaches to information security. We need to turn things around, so that people lose less from cyber fraud," she said.
Earlier this week the Bank of Russia reported that in 2023 Russian banks prevented fraudulent thefts worth 5.8 trillion rubles ($63.6 bln), but attackers were able to carry out 1.17 million successful transactions, which is 33% more than in 2022, and steal 15.8 billion rubles ($173 mln). One of the possible reasons is that telephone scams are becoming more sophisticated. As a consequence of these attacks, bank customer losses increased by 11.5%.
According to the regulator, last year the share of funds that banks returned to clients almost doubled (1.38 billion rubles ($15.1 mln), or 8.7% of the total volume of stolen money). The regulator sent for blocking information about 575,700 telephone numbers used by malefactors, and initiated the blocking of 42,800 fraudulent sites and pages on social networks.
About the forum
The Cybersecurity in Finance forum is taking place in Yekaterinburg, in Russia’s Ural region, from February 14 to 16. The Forum is the largest event dedicated to discussing trends and challenges in information security, as well as priorities and prospects in banking cyber security going forward. In 2024, the Forum’s participants will focus on exploring development strategies for information security in finance in a rapidly changing environment. TASS is the general information partner of the forum.