José de Lima Massano was a speaker on the first panel of the 1st Forum and Expo on Cybersecurity, having stressed that the digitization journey has already been going on for 20 years, an exercise that has always faced great challenges in adapting institutions, that is, for systems to be prepared for transactions to occur safely.
"Transactions are being carried out in the way we are doing today, increasingly digitally", said José de Lima Massano, admitting that there are still many manual transactions.
According to the governor of the central bank, there are still challenges, first of all for the BNA itself, "which needs to understand this phenomenon and which also has to be prepared to protect itself", but also for the operators.
"We have been producing standards, there is a debate at the level of regulators about the scope of our decisions at that level, with regard to cybersecurity, how far should we go. And what we already have in Angola today are generic standards for commercial banks and other operators of the financial system supervised by the central bank on principles that they must adopt for the protection of systems, applications, information", he stressed.
This norm dates from 2020 and, according to José de Lima Massano, from that year onwards, "a growing number of attacks" has been registered. "We are talking about a growth of around 200 percent in that period", he said.
For the central bank governor, having this rate of attacks on the system and the same remaining resilient, "means that there is work that is being carried out with a remarkable degree of success" by the operators of the financial system.
"The BNA itself also has to protect itself, because in addition to the payment system that we manage [at a] national level, we also have international reserves under our responsibility, the BNA manages reserves of around 14 billion dollars and we have daily, to give you an idea, about 350 attacks, attempts to penetrate our systems", he stressed.
According to José de Lima Massano, in the event of an attack there is an alternative center called "business continuity", which commercial banks also have.
"We had some banks with attacks with a certain level of success, we can say success in the sense that there was penetration, there was invasion, but what we have achieved so far is to ensure that this process does not have a loss of financial value for depositors, it did not happen", emphasized.
"And on the side of our financial system, what we had was that the operation had to stop and that way it has costs, applications that had to be raised, it has costs, but there was no outflow of resources through that way", he added.
Alongside cybersecurity, the system also manages other issues, such as fraud and scams.
In this 20-year journey, according to the BNA governor, the Angolan financial system is equipped with more capable staff to deal with this phenomenon.
"But it is a front where no one can rest assured, the need is permanent, investments also continue to be high", he said, stressing the "importance of both these forums for the exchange of experiences, but also of consultation at national level".
We have to have a system that allows us, in a timely manner, if there is any sign of an attack on any public or private infrastructure, to have a collective capacity for reaction", he pointed out.
