Abstract
Banks facilitate spending and investment, which fuel growth in the economy, however, despite their important role in economy, banks are nevertheless susceptible to failure. Banks, like any other business, can go bankrupt. But unlike most other businesses, the failure of banks, especially very large ones, can have far-reaching implications. Ethiopian Banks continually increase their dependence on IT systems. The advancement of technology and an increasing use of IT solutions exposed banks for attacks more than ever. Even though, banks are deploying prevention mechanisms to keep out hackers and attempts of cyber-attacks, incidents occur occasionally. This tells there is a need for an effective and efficient management of information security incidents. International standards and guidelines for incident management exist but, researches that assess current practices are few in literature. This research conducted as a qualitative case study in which current practice of a bank’s information security incident response management assessed with the aim to identify gaps from the best practice. The data was collected through interview. The finding revealed that bank x don’t have a predefined and separate information security incident management plan. But, to some extent it was compliant with international standards and guidelines in some of incident handling procedures. An alarming finding that indicated bank x never performed rehearsal was highlighted in this study. Lack of employees’ awareness, information gap among departments, lack of experienced and skilled incident handlers and enhancement of new threats were among prominent challenges identified. Finally, recommendation for successful information security incident management was proposed.
Recommended Citation
Yohannes, Tsedale; Lessa, Lemma; and Negash, Solomon, "Information Security Incident Response Management in an Ethiopian Bank: A Gap Analysis" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 22.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/adv_info_systems_research/adv_info_systems_research/22
Information Security Incident Response Management in an Ethiopian Bank: A Gap Analysis
Banks facilitate spending and investment, which fuel growth in the economy, however, despite their important role in economy, banks are nevertheless susceptible to failure. Banks, like any other business, can go bankrupt. But unlike most other businesses, the failure of banks, especially very large ones, can have far-reaching implications. Ethiopian Banks continually increase their dependence on IT systems. The advancement of technology and an increasing use of IT solutions exposed banks for attacks more than ever. Even though, banks are deploying prevention mechanisms to keep out hackers and attempts of cyber-attacks, incidents occur occasionally. This tells there is a need for an effective and efficient management of information security incidents. International standards and guidelines for incident management exist but, researches that assess current practices are few in literature. This research conducted as a qualitative case study in which current practice of a bank’s information security incident response management assessed with the aim to identify gaps from the best practice. The data was collected through interview. The finding revealed that bank x don’t have a predefined and separate information security incident management plan. But, to some extent it was compliant with international standards and guidelines in some of incident handling procedures. An alarming finding that indicated bank x never performed rehearsal was highlighted in this study. Lack of employees’ awareness, information gap among departments, lack of experienced and skilled incident handlers and enhancement of new threats were among prominent challenges identified. Finally, recommendation for successful information security incident management was proposed.