KARACHI: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has planned sweeping upgrades to its cybersecurity infrastructure.
The central bank will implement a comprehensive ‘Digital Brand Protection Solution’ alongside a centralized platform for incident reporting and threat intelligence sharing across the country’s financial sector.
The move comes as the central bank acknowledges its sizable technology and digital footprint across the nation, which supports numerous critical business functions.
Source said that protecting the SBP’s technology and digital assets from cyber-attacks and criminals is now a keystone to the institution’s image and reputation.
Comprehensive Digital Brand Protection
Under the new framework, the SBP will deploy an enterprise-class solution capable of aggregating, normalizing, and analyzing both internal and external threat intelligence, including open source and industry feeds.
The system will provide API-level integrations with existing security infrastructure such as SIEMs, SOAR, firewalls, and gateways using interoperable formats like STIX and TAXII.
Moreover, the central bank’s upgraded defense system will collect threat data from multiple sources, including IPs, URLs, domains, hashes, and emails, while generating risk scores and quantitative risk assessments against those feeds.
Security teams will have access to a single lookup functionality for multiple types of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), which will be enriched through sources such as WHOIS, domain data, and SSL information.
A key feature of the SBP’s new approach is proactive threat hunting across the surface, deep, and dark web.
The system will identify active phishing pages, evil twin websites, fraudulent webpages misusing the SBP’s name or logo, and fake mobile or desktop applications designed to resemble the central bank’s digital presence.
It will also detect leaked credentials, confidential documents leaked online based on watermarks, references to confidential projects, and fake social media profiles impersonating the organization or its employees.
The SBP further mandates that its new solution includes defacement detection of all externally exposed web assets, along with detection of newly registered domains based on company assets, including common additions and permutations.
To combat online fraud effectively, the system will perform on-demand and unlimited takedowns of fraudulent sites and social media pages.
A Sector-Wide Intelligence Hub
Beyond securing its own infrastructure, the SBP is establishing a centralized, automated platform to enable structured incident reporting and threat intelligence sharing across all regulated entities under its supervision.
This platform will comprise two core modules, one dedicated to incident reporting and another to threat intelligence and information sharing.
The central bank aims to standardize and enhance the incident reporting process across all stakeholders while implementing workflow-based, approval-driven dissemination of threat intelligence to ensure data accuracy, relevance, and confidentiality.
The system will also generate compliance monitoring reports to support regulatory oversight, significantly strengthening sector-wide situational awareness and coordinated response capabilities.
Enhanced Capabilities for Security Teams
The SBP’s upgraded security framework will provide visualization dashboards for Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, allowing users to download IOC details in PDF, CSV, or other formats. A detailed reporting panel will enable report extraction with scheduling and emailing capabilities.
The system will support multiple user access with default role templates and maintain comprehensive audit logs against all events and actions carried out on the platform.
A threat encyclopedia will catalog key terminology describing malware, campaigns, threat actor profiles, TTPs, IOCs per threat, and monitoring of APT-related activity.
The solution will enrich the existing SIEM via API based on its intelligence feeds and provide alerting based on customizable rules and filters.
Additionally, the SBP will have the ability to perform selective corporate information removal and full remote wipe when necessary.
The central bank will also implement an interface for self-configuration of assets, including domains, mail domains, VIPs, IP addresses, technologies in use, and brand names, along with reporting of newly disclosed vulnerabilities based on public organizational assets and monitoring of third-party threat intelligence feeds.
Officials emphasize that these enhancements will ensure the central bank remains resilient against increasingly sophisticated cyber criminals targeting the financial sector, protecting both its own reputation and the stability of Pakistan’s broader financial system.
