By Marcela Ayres
(Reuters) -Brazil’s central bank is preparing to move forward with stricter regulation of the financial system to curb an “increase in cyberattacks,” the bank’s supervisory director, Ailton Aquino, said on Wednesday.
This year, as of October, 68 incidents have been reported, including 37 cases of fraud, he said at a news conference in Sao Paulo.
This represents the highest figure since the central bank began tracking such data in 2018 and is already “above the 59 cases recorded in all of last year,” according to the bank’s Financial Stability Report published earlier in the day.
Aquino cited the need for tighter oversight of third-party services and application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as bridges that allow different software systems to securely and automatically communicate with each other.
He said the central bank was finalizing rules for direct connections to the financial system’s network and hoped to publish them soon.
“The agenda remains strong,” Aquino said.
In September, the central bank issued “new rules” to strengthen the security of the country’s financial system and, earlier this week, regulated the cryptoasset market to help prevent money laundering and fraud.
(Reporting by Marcela Ayres; Editing by Alex Richardson and Nick Zieminski)