A Direct Line Blog

By Donya Parrish, MCU VP-Risk Management

There is no question that cybersecurity is a threat to the financial services industry. Any topic that NCUA devotes a full page of their website to is clearly important. Now, the NCUA also spells “cyber security” as two words and that confuses me, but I digress.

You can hardly go a day without news of a breach or new threat to the security of the personal financial information your credit union maintains for members. The dark web pays good money to anyone who can provide that data, and that, coupled with reputation risk, makes it vitally important that your credit union take the threat seriously.

As a board member, you don’t need to be an IT expert to keep up. This Credit Union Cybersecurity article not only does a nice job of breaking down the basics of the threats, it also provides three “practical tips” as a way to better protect your credit union and approach compliance. You’ll never reach 100% compliance, since threats evolve and the work never ends, but this might provide you with a few questions to ask at the next board meeting so you know how your credit union is working to keep information safe.

If you have a favorite resource or go-to site to keep up on cybersecurity, let me know. This is another interesting article regarding passwords and how quickly they can be hacked.