Banks to act out war-game scenarios to counter sudden systems failure

[nadinbrzezinski]

Cash machines that cannot be filled with money or pin numbers failing to work at supermarket check-outs are among the scenarios that will be played out in a series of high-level wargames by 87 City firms.

Under the auspices of the Financial Services Authority, firms will be asked to imagine what might happen if next year's Olympics causes traffic gridlock or if there is a cyber attack that prevents technology functioning smoothing.

The market wide exercise is the first since 2009 and takes place at a time when the industry is gripped by the eurozone crisis but regarded as essential by regulators for contingency planning in the year ahead.

The firms will have to work out how quickly they can return to "business as usual" during the two pretend scenarios that will be played out across the City on Tuesday from 8am.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/21/banking-cybercrime-olympics-2012?CMP=twt_fd

Curious...

[FirstLight]

1. ...why would they give out the time of this 'exercise'..?

unless they expect it to cause troubles with customers? gee I wonder how much cane be stolen in that time while they are offline?

this doesn't feel right...and even if my tinfoil wasn't a bit tight...wouldn't you think they are maybe trying to play things out as if to prepare FOR the worst? that is creepier still

[The Straight Story]

2. I worked at chase and ran several of their data centers for years, reason for the date is

You are co-coordinating with other entities and there are federal (and thus public) guidelines you have to follow on large scale testing.

Smaller scale testing (single center testing) was kept private.

These simulations do not need to have production servers involved (we used test systems and applied the knowledge gained to on line systems).

Most likely there is a test bed set up between companies to see what would happen under certain conditions (from server fail over to network and ISDN line failures, physical connections between sites using multiple carriers where you need to physically change connections, etc).

Another of our tests dealt with people - what if X was not there, or Y and you could not reach them (I had to take a week off a year and have no contact with the bank for disaster recovery reasons).