Fear of cybercrime has overtaken the eurozone crisis and economic malaise as the most pressing issue facing the UK's top banks, a senior Bank of England official says.
A series of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on US banks and a rising incidence of sophisticated hacking exploitss by organised criminal gangs has raised the threat level for UK banks says the BoE's director of financial stability Andrew Haldane.
In written evidence presented to a panel of politicians on the Treasury Select Committee, Haldane listed cyber risk as a "rapidly rising area of risk with potentially systemic implications".
Haldane said fears about potential damage to the financial sector from a large-scale cyber attack had been raised in recent meetings with five of the UK biggest banks, displacing the usual litany of economic worries.
In more recent times, the fall out from the credit crunch and associated liquidity problems has overshadowed the threats posed by cyberattacks against the nation's banks and critical infrastructure such as payment systems, he said.
Haldane said regulators and government should "take a close look at the state of preparedness" of major banks to protect against cyber-attacks.
"I hope we can do more on this at the FPC (Financial Policy Committee) as part of wider government initiatives," he said.