During last week’s Innovation & Insight event, Celent CEO Jamie Macgregor led a thought provoking panel discussion about the situation in Ukraine and its implications for financial institutions. Afterwards, Jamie published a blog introducing Celent’s Ukraine Response Framework, a set of priorities that operations and technology executives can use to chart a path forward through all the volatility and uncertainty.

I’d like to dig deeper into the subject of improving resilience, starting with cybersecurity. Cyber risk had already been ranked alongside infectious diseases and extreme weather as the “clear and present dangers” of our time, according to a recent World Economic Forum report. With the Ukraine invasion, that risk has gone up further. Yesterday, the White House shared intelligence that the Russian government is “exploring options for potential cyberattacks.”

Therefore, financial institutions need to assume that major cybersecurity attacks are imminent, whether by state sponsored actors or opportunistic criminals seeking to take advantage of the chaos. Even if an attack doesn’t occur, this is a good time to test cybersecurity risk management and incident management plans.