NEW DELHI: A new disturbing trend has emerged posing a cyber security threat, as central cyber and intelligence agencies have flagged to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) that unrestricted access to critical banking data with bank employees and third-party vendors has directly been fuelling rampant online frauds and massive financial losses for people in the country, officials said on Saturday.With reports pouring in from the agencies, the officials said, the issue has been taken up at the highest level in the government by the MHA calling a meeting of senior officials including those from the financial and banking institutions. “The issue had been discussed threadbare and instructions were passed on to devise a solution to this menace,” a senior official, in the know of development, said. He said, “According to the agencies’ input, highly sensitive financial data exposure to outsourced staff and third-party vendors of banks leads to rampant information leaks, as they are being shared with cyber criminals, who in turn exploit to breach online banking systems to target and defraud people.”According to sources, privy to the meeting, the trend is even more alarming, as intelligence agencies said complicity of senior management level bank officials can also be not ruled out, as this has also come to light that both public and private sector banks have seldom failed to act against fraudulent activities, despite repeated complaints.Intelligence inputs suggested that banking institutions failed to take action against nearly half of the fraudulent accounts reported on the National Cybercrime Reporting Portal (NCRP), the sources said.A detailed analytical presentation was made during the meeting on the cyber fraud trends, mule accounts, and banks’ response times, which indicated a staggering increase in the incidents of online fraud, they said, adding that this proved that the present security architecture is not robust enough.The ever-evolving canvas of online financial frauds, during the meeting it was emphasied that banks should take stringent action and align their security architecture with that of the latest Reserve Bank of India’s advisory, the officials said.
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