Pub. 7 2016 Issue 2

www.wvbankers.org 18 West Virginia Banker S o much has changed in our conception of information security. A personal story: my family owned a small printing business in Saint Albans, West Virginia, that produced banking educational materials for school-age children. For more than three decades, the business, “NOWCommuni- cations, Inc.,” created these products and sought sponsorships from community and regional banks across the country to assist with providing the information for their local school system. Full of age-old financial values and wisdom and stressing personal relationships with banks, these products included short books with titles such as “You and Your Community Bank” and “My First Savings Account.” Nowhere in any of this literature did identity theft, information security (other than to store your bank book in a safe place) or the like appear. In fact, the information encourages the reader to obtain a social security number (if you don’t already have one) and write it in the ‘work book’ section. This isn’t to say that we weren’t security conscious in the decades before the preva- lence of computer technology or before we realized how dangerous the theft of personal- ly identifiable information (“PII”) could be to our financial health. At this time, we thought of bank robberies in the traditional sense — with forced entry, physical violence and large safes—a conventional threat to the physical security of a financial institution that was largely unchanged for centuries. As such, our response to this kind of threat was very ad- vanced and comprehensive. From advanced safe technology to video surveillance, our culture understood and answered this kind of danger. As we all know (or should), today’s ‘bank robbers’ are hardly ever seen, leave little evidence, and participate in a criminal activity that is rapidly evolving and capable of much greater damage than stealing cash from a bank safe. Stating the obvious, the exponential growth of cyber warfare is enough to befuddle and scare even the most astute and experienced information security professionals. Our Cyber Security Perspectives By Thomas S. Bailey, Spillman Thomas & Battle