NAB repels around 50 million cyber attacks a month, CEO Ross McEwan said last night.
Reflecting on the recent catastrophic intrusions on the systems of Medibank Private and Optus, McEwan confirmed the topic was consuming an abundance of board and management time.
“I was in the control room the other day, and the board lit up like a Christmas tree,” McEwan told a fireside chat hosted by FINSIA in Melbourne.
He did not say, and didn’t need to, that the prospect of the compromise of a major bank’s customer data fills the industry, regulators and government with dread.
“I said two years ago, to a parliamentary committee, this would be the biggest issue in Australia,” he said.
“These attacks are massive. One staff slip-up will let someone in … a fourth-party supplier to a third-party supplier.
“Our shields are up all the time."
Meanwhile, NAB yesterday confirmed that its staff voted, by a 54 per cent margin, against a pay deal, even though it was the most generous pay offer in the industry.
In a ballot fiercely contested by the Finance Sector Union, more than 13,000 staff voted (out of an NAB payroll of roughly 35,000). Around four times as many staff were motivated to vote as did so in the ballot for the current enterprise agreement a few years ago.
The union said it will seek to recommence negotations with the bank shortly.