CBE Banks on Security with New Integrated Solution

The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia has launched its 30 million Br security centre to keep out hackers and attempts of cyber attack to its IT Infrastructure. This new investment boosts innovation in the working environment and working methods, as well as reinforcing security.

The security centre is part of a wider project dubbed Integrated Cyber-Security Solution, carried out by the Information Network Security Agency (INSA) to bring modern information security solutions to the bank. The project had four objectives dealing with cyber threat management, security evaluation and auditing services, information security management and information security awareness.

This first of its kind in the country, the system has been in the making for the past two years.

To meet the project’s deliverables, particularly its objective of cyber threat management, INSA sought the services of a Korean company following a competitive bid, which saw also saw participation from other international tech firms such as IBM.

Igloo won the bid and signed a contract to establish the centre and also maintenance services.

Igloo Security was established two decades ago and has pioneered the transformation of security in IT infrastructure, from Firewalls and anti-virus to a domestic integrated security management market.

Spider TM, the premier product of this company, is a security information & event management (SIEM) system, dubbed as sim technology. It carries the purpose of detection, analysis, response, operation, management and prevention.

The programme is expected to provide a holistic view of an organisation’s information technology (IT) security, with the capacity to register the flow of any logs generated from hardware and software. It is expected to further analyse correlated and consolidated patterns of possible cyber attacks. If it identifies a serious threat, it will declare a disaster, notifying system administrators and the security operations centre about the nature and source of the cyber attack .

“The major point here is that the technology will enable the bank to protect its cyber space,” Yitbarek Tesfaye, manager for information system security, told Fortune. “It took more than a year due to the sophistication of the technology and the turnover of the bank’s experts who involved in the process.”

The CBE currently deploys 1,027 ATMs and 4,458 PoS. At night time, the bank has only limited transactions via such services and mobile, however.

Back in the day, the bank used to face threats that affected its operations, including virus breakouts while only 32pc were found to have given proper attention to the issue and implemented proper information security governance.

“We sometimes face attacks that shut the Bank’s branches for hours, with some demanding a complete replacement of the whole computers,” recalled Yitbarek. “Now the system enables the CBE to identify the threats early.”

For monitoring this operation, the bank has a dedicated team of 15 experts – the so-called cyber attack analysts. The centre has its premises at the Addis Abeba branch office of CBE on Gambia Street. These experts took a 30-day training course provided by the South Korean company.

Along with the implementation of its own protecting mechanism, the bank has also joined INSA in its efforts to establish the same system to protect the cyber space of the country’s strategic institutions. It focused on protecting public institutions considered as mission critical, such as the Ministry of National Defence. The same South Korean company will work on this too.

The whole project is part of CBE’s strategic plan to become an internationally competitive commercial bank by 2025.


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