New Federal Banking Rule Requires Notifying Regulators of Cyber Incident Within 36 Hours

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Here is a new reason to get your cybersecurity incident response program in order: federal banking regulators have issued a new rule requiring banks to notify regulators of “qualifying” cybersecurity incidents within 36 hours of recognition. This rule has the collaboration of the FDIC, the Federal Reserve and the Comptroller of Currency, and will be effective on April 1 of 2022.

It’s not as bad as it seems, though. According to the rule, a computer security incident is defined as an occurrence that “results in actual harm to the confidentiality, integrity or availability of an information system or the information that that system processes, stores or transmits.” However, a computer security incident that must be reported according to the new timeline is one that has disrupted or degraded a bank’s operations and its ability to deliver services to a material portion of its customer base and to business lines. Since this is somewhat nebulous, they also listed a number of examples of incidents requiring 36 hour notification. These include (but are not limited to):

  • A failed system upgrade resulting in widespread user outage.
  • A large-scale DDoS attack disrupting account access for more than four hours.
  • A ransomware attack that encrypts core banking systems or backup data.
  • A bank service provider experiencing a widespread system outage.
  • A computer hacking incident disabling banking operations for an extended period of time.
  • An unrecoverable system failure resulting in activation of business continuity / disaster recovery plan.
  • Malware on a bank’s network that poses an imminent threat to core business lines or critical operations.

This same rule also requires banking service providers to notify at least one bank-designated point of contact at each affected customer banking organization “as soon as possible” when the service provider has experienced a computer security incident that disrupts services for 4 hours or more.

Although 36 hours seems like an adequate amount of time for banks to notify the FDIC, in reality this time is very short indeed. From having worked with financial institutions that have had various compromises in the past, we know that determining if the incident is real, determining exactly what happened, when, how and was perpetrated by whom are thorny problems that can take days to figure out. There is also the reality to consider that modern cyberattacks often have multiple stages in which one attack is used to obfuscate other insidious attacks that are launched during the confusion. The regulators have been working with banking industry to try to craft requirements that do not overly burden the affected financial institutions during times of crisis, but who knows how well that will work? Guess we’ll see next spring!