Chris Lewis, Head of Solutions at Synectics Solutions

“Criminals will undoubtedly be targeting users of sites affected by the Fastly outage, particularly those offering a subscription service. If you recall TSB’s botched IT upgrade back in 2018, this caused a surge in phishing attacks across the finance industry with a 10,000% uptick in the weeks after their IT failure.  

"Giants like Amazon and Spotify will have significant security processes in place to protect themselves and their customers, so my concerns lie with smaller organisations who offer subscription services and whose customer data may not be subject to similarly robust security measures. Here, the onus is on those companies to contact their customers with a reminder of security best practice and how to spot phishing attacks while also preparing internally for any potential attack, which in my view should be expected as a guaranteed outcome. Additionally, the importance and value of disaster recovery services to ensure a rapid return to action while preventing substantial data loss cannot be underestimated.  

"Within banking there is a mega-trend towards operational resilience to prevent losses from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events. This means ensuring that banking institutions have – amongst other policies and processes - resilient ICT systems that are subject to regularly tested protection, detection, response and recovery programs and that they convey relevant and timely information that enable risk management and decision-making processes to fully support and facilitate critical operations. However, banks can be as robust as possible but if there are weaknesses in other areas of the ecosystem, their strength is diminished.”