EIOPA: ESAs publish joint advice on information and communication technology risk management and cybersecurity

10 April 2019

The European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) published two pieces of Joint Advice in response to requests made by the European Commission in its March 2018 FinTech Action Plan.

These are:

Regarding the need for legislative improvements, in developing the Joint Advice the ESAs' objective was that every relevant entity should be subject to clear general requirements on governance of ICT, including cybersecurity, to ensure the safe provision of regulated services.

Guided by this objective, the proposals presented in the Advice aim at promoting stronger operational resilience and harmonisation in the EU financial sector by applying changes to their respective sectoral legislation. Incident reporting is highly relevant to ICT risk management and allows relevant entities and authorities to log, monitor, analyse and respond to ICT operational, ICT security and fraud incidents. Therefore, the ESAs call for streamlining aspects of the incident reporting frameworks across the financial sector.

Regarding the costs and benefits of a coherent cyber resilience testing framework, the ESAs see clear benefits of such a framework. However, at present there are significant differences across and within financial sectors as regards the maturity level of cybersecurity. In the short-term, the ESAs advise to focus on achieving a minimum level of cyber-resilience across the sectors, proportionate to the needs and characteristics of the relevant entities. Furthermore, the ESAs propose to establish on a voluntary basis an EU wide coherent testing framework together with other relevant authorities taking into account existing initiatives, and with a focus on Threat Lead Penetration Testing (TLPT). In the long-term, the ESAs aim to ensure a sufficient cyber maturity level of identified cross-sector entities.

Full news

Advice on ICT legislative improvements

Advice on a coherent cyber resilience testing framework


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