Australian Financial Crimes Exchange

The Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) is uniquely positioned as a centralised & trusted portal for Australian banks and government agencies to share information on cyber crime events. Sharing data of this type allows identification of trends not obvious within just one organisation. 

The AFCX play a critical role in helping its members identify and fight cyber crime in Australia.

The Challenge

The AFCX data exchange platform is most actively used by Australia’s larger financial institutions, however, there is a growing demand for access from smaller providers of financial services such as credit unions, community banks and industry specific credit providers.

To meet this growing need, AFCX have developed and launched their “AFCX IQ” platform. The platform shares highly sensitive data about financial and cybercrime to approved members, so must be highly secure and meet stringent compliance requirements.

Our Approach

We worked closely with the team at AFCX to design the IQ platform and development was undertaken using an Agile methodology. 

We used the following techniques to meet the security requirements of the project:

• Active Code Reviews

  Every line of code written was reviewed by an experienced engineer.

• Minimum Dependencies

  We minimised the number of software packages used in the platform to keep our work as simple as possible. This has reduced the number of potential attack vectors.

• Third Party Penetration Testing

  AFCX commissioned an independent third party firm to perform penetration testing.

The Results

Our work passed penetration testing with ease and the platform has been released. We’re happy to report strong interest from the smaller financial institutions that the IQ platform was built to serve.

Interestingly, larger financial institutions, who already have access to the underlying data, are also keen to use the platform because the new IQ search interface makes identifying potential Cyber Crime & Financial fraud easier than ever.