The Vice President of the Republic, H.E Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has on Wednesday, May 24, 2023 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 entirely.
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 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 authorized banks.
As these organizations 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 organizations implementing SIEMs to send logs and alerts, as well as aggregate data and reports.
