SWIFT Customer Security Controls Framework v2022

Control Objective: Evaluate the risk and readiness of the organisation based on plausible cyber-attack scenarios. 

Scenario-based risk assessments are conducted regularly to improve incident response preparedness and to increase the maturity of the organisation’s security programme. 

Scenario-based risk assessments, including cyber wargames, test attacks on existing systems and processes targeting the hosted SWIFT infrastructure. Scenario-based risk assessments include technical and business driven exercises performed as part of institution risk management. 

These assessments include the following threats: end-user impersonation, message tampering, message eavesdropping, third-party software weaknesses, compromising systems or Denial of Service (DoS) attacks affecting service availability. Results of the assessment and existing mitigations help identify areas of risks that may require future actions, risk mitigations or an update of the cyber-incident response plan. 

Identified actions, mitigations, or updates must be reported and closed according to their criticality as per the Information Security Risk Management (ISRM) process. 

Several ISRM frameworks exist and can be consulted41 to define the user's proper ISRM and resources (such as CIS-Critical Security Controls). These frameworks can be used to start implementing a basic risk management process to be further enhanced to address user's specific risks.