The Vice President of Ghana, Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia on Wednesday commissioned a state of the art Financial Industry Command Security Operation Centre (FICSOC) in Accra.
The project established and operated by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) is a key component of systems to address the challenges of cyber security is the first of its kind in West Africa and Africa as a whole.
The FICSOC is said to prevent, rapidly detect and share information as well as respond to possible cyber threats targeted at the financial industry and ultimately the country at large.
Dr. Bawumia noted that all banks are connected to the FICSOC and receive real time security alerts, intelligence and traffic analysis on cyber threats.
He congratulated the BoG as usual for setting the pace in Africa as well as charging the financial players to take full advantage of the capabilities of the FICSOC, while continually strengthening in-house security operations.
The directive was implemented gradually over a 36-month period with strong monitoring and control among authorised banks.
As these organisations worked to fully implement the directive, it became clear that the Central Bank needed to set up an industry Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to allow those organisations implementing SIEMs to send logs and alerts, as well as aggregate data and reports.