Huyen

Data Scientist

Leader in international policy-making

"There are several departments at DNB that deal with particular aspects of cybersecurity. I work in Cyber Resilience & Crisis Management, where I mainly deal with the cyber resilience of the Dutch financial sector. Working together with the sector and other partners, we address the broad range of challenges in this area. You can roughly divide that into policy, intelligence and the TIBER programme. In terms of policy, we advise the Executive Board and other departments on cyber issues that may affect financial stability. Furthermore, we are at the forefront of national, European and global policy-making in the field. And that’s really fascinating, because there are a lot of actors involved. These include commercial parties such as banks, stock exchanges, pension funds, insurers – and increasingly their suppliers. But also authorities, including the European Commission, governments, the ECB and national central banks.

Ethical hacks on core financial infrastructure

We get our intelligence from everywhere. For example, we use a platform that collects global cyberthreats; we extract what is relevant to the financial sector, giving us an overview of the latest developments. We also track a lot online, and we regularly consult with colleagues at other central banks. Every year, we prepare a “threat landscape” of current and future digital threats to ourselves and the financial sector. Our TIBER programme is where the real action is. The major financial institutions hire threat intelligence specialists and ethical hackers for the tests, and test managers from our team supervise the hack attempts. As a data scientist, one of the things I look at is to make sure the scenario matches the techniques, tactics and procedures a real-world hacker would use, and whether the test goes according to our TIBER procedure.

Although I don't have a typical data science background, my ideas and different perspectives are really appreciated here.

Protecting the Netherlands from cybercriminals

TIBER was developed by DNB, and the ECB found it such an interesting programme that it has now been adopted by many central banks in Europe. This promotes uniformity and comparability. We are now also working on another programme: ART, Advanced Red Teaming, which is a kind of “TIBER Light” for other major financial institutions that are a little less critical. We are also sharing this programme with other sectors that are vital to keeping the Netherlands up and running. These sectors can than do their own testing at the highest level. I think that’s really wonderful, because it is essential for more and more organisations to evaluate whether their cyberdefences are up to the task. Besides all these topics, I also look at ways to work smarter and faster as a team. For example, is there room for improvement in the way we collect our information? Are we seeing trends or developments that affect our priorities? Through all these projects and programmes, we are working every day to make the Netherlands even more resilient to crybercrime.”