Banks Simulate Another Crisis
Three of the world’s “too big to fail” banking institutions just ran a drill for the next great financial crisis, and it went about as well as expected! They say the threat is cyber, and that it falls to Wall Street to stop our portfolios from being reset to zero.
Ransomware is a weapon of mass destruction. ‘Petya’ targeted Microsoft in 2016, freezing banks and metro systems. A year later, ‘WannaCry’ spread the globe like a virus, holding hostage Britain’s National Health Service, multiple auto-makers, nuclear power stations, and even FedEx. To “decrypt your files,” the crims wanted billions of dollars in, you guessed it, Bitcoin!
Now, in an effort to prevent the global financial system from falling prey, a catastrophic “Quantum Dawn V” training simulation was run yesterday. Thomas Price, boss of industry trade group SIFMA, can give us the inside scoop!
At 7 a.m. yesterday, 800 bankers from the US, Europe, and Asia joined a convenient conference call together and then pretended it was business as usual. Then, dun, dun, dun, a “systemically important financial institution was attacked by malicious ransomware and knocked offline!” With America under siege, a timely and decisive response was required.
“The initial scenario was followed by a number of questions and a discussion of rules about public disclosure.” Well, thank God for that! But as US banks grappled with whom to blame and the wording of their press releases, two more major banks in Asia and the UK were hit and also taken offline.
At this point in the sim, our global financial system is at breaking point, stocks are plummeting, and the public is making a run on the bank. So, how do we respond? Unfortunately, that’s where the exercise ended. Perhaps someone forgot to top up the meter? Anyway, we assume there were ongoing efforts to resuscitate your grandparents’ 401ks, but we will have to wait for Protivi, chronically understaffed cybersecurity firm, to release its public report on Quantum Dawn to see the full observations on how banks performed. That should be a fun read!
