Wall Street Execs Detail Updated Security Plans

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- As the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approached last week, Wall Street executives outlined for Congress a series of physical and cyber security measures that continue to be revised to help protect financial trading systems in the U.S.
Appearing at a House Financial Services Committee hearing, senior government officials and executives from key financial institutions in New York described the efforts that continue to go into bolstering security for the nation's critical financial trading systems.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, New York Stock Exchange Inc. has spent more than $100 million to boost physical and cyber security and improve redundancy and business continuity, said Robert G. Britz, the NYSE's president and co-chief operating officer.
Among the improvements are a new contingency trading floor, an expansion of the emergency command center operated by Securities Industry Automation Corp. (SIAC), a remote network operations center and an ongoing effort to establish a remote national market system data center.
The NYSE has also deployed a geographically dispersed fiber-optic routing backbone that would allow equity brokers to maintain connections to the markets in the event of another 9/11-type of attack. Called the Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure (SFTI), it connects more than 600 financial services firms.
All of the SFTI's equipment, connections, power supplies, network links and access centers are redundant, and its architecture features independent, self-healing fiber-optic rings, making it independent of all other telecommunications circuits and conduits, Britz said. The NYSE and SIAC also recently completed work on a remote network operations center that's due to go live in the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, John R. Mohr, executive vice president of The Clearing House Association LLC (TCH), a global payment systems firm that clears and settles more than $1.5 trillion in trades per day, said TCH hired a contractor to conduct both physical and cyber penetration tests. As a result of the tests, he said, the company reconfigured one of its key facilities, implemented biometric access-control systems and "all but eliminated visitor access to our operating centers."
TCH also developed a tertiary data center in another part of the country that is fully equipped to take over operation of its Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) within an hour of a simultaneous failure of the other two CHIPS data centers, said Mohr. Using custom data mirroring software specially developed by TCH, CHIPS was able to overcome the distance limitations of synchronous mirroring technology and still achieve recovery times consistent with synchronous mirroring approaches, he said.
Samuel H. Gaer, CIO of New YorkMercantile Exchange Inc., said all essential employees at his organization have been issued cell phones with two-way radio capability and portable two-way e-mail devices, some of which can be used to make emergency phone calls. The workers were also given laptops with remote connection software and cellular modem cards to wirelessly connect to the exchange's system resources anywhere cellular coverage is available, Gaer said.