DORA Article 45. Information-sharing arrangements on cyber threat information and intelligence

Taking into account the potential systemic risk entailed by increased outsourcing practices and by the ICT third-party concentration, and mindful of the insufficiency of national mechanisms in providing financial supervisors with adequate tools to quantify, qualify and redress the consequences of ICT risk occurring at critical ICT third-party service providers, it is necessary to establish an appropriate Oversight Framework allowing for a continuous monitoring of the activities of ICT third-party service providers that are critical ICT third-party service providers to financial entities, while ensuring that the confidentiality and security of customers other than financial entities is preserved. While intra-group provision of ICT services entails specific risks and benefits, it should not be automatically considered less risky than the provision of ICT services by providers outside of a financial group and should therefore be subject to the same regulatory framework. However, when ICT services are provided from within the same financial group, financial entities might have a higher level of control over intra-group providers, which ought to be taken into account in the overall risk assessment.

With ICT risk becoming more and more complex and sophisticated, good measures for the detection and prevention of ICT risk depend to a great extent on the regular sharing between financial entities of threat and vulnerability intelligence. Information sharing contributes to creating increased awareness of cyber threats. In turn, this enhances the capacity of financial entities to prevent cyber threats from becoming real ICT-related incidents and enables financial entities to more effectively contain the impact of ICT-related incidents and to recover faster. In the absence of guidance at Union level, several factors seem to have inhibited such intelligence sharing, in particular uncertainty about its compatibility with data protection, anti-trust and liability rules.

In addition, doubts about the type of information that can be shared with other market participants, or with non-supervisory authorities (such as ENISA, for analytical input, or Europol, for law enforcement purposes) lead to useful information being withheld. Therefore, the extent and quality of information sharing currently remains limited and fragmented, with relevant exchanges mostly being local (by way of national initiatives) and with no consistent Union-wide information-sharing arrangements tailored to the needs of an integrated financial system. It is therefore important to strengthen those communication channels.

Financial entities should be encouraged to exchange among themselves cyber threat information and intelligence, and to collectively leverage their individual knowledge and practical experience at strategic, tactical and operational levels with a view to enhancing their capabilities to adequately assess, monitor, defend against, and respond to cyber threats, by participating in information sharing arrangements. It is therefore necessary to enable the emergence at Union level of mechanisms for voluntary information-sharing arrangements which, when conducted in trusted environments, would help the community of the financial industry to prevent and collectively respond to cyber threats by quickly limiting the spread of ICT risk and impeding potential contagion throughout the financial channels. Those mechanisms should comply with the applicable competition law rules of the Union set out in the Communication from the Commission of 14 January 2011 entitled ‘Guidelines on the applicability of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to horizontal cooperation agreements’, as well as with Union data protection rules, in particular Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council . They should operate based on the use of one or more of the legal bases that are laid down in Article 6 of that Regulation, such as in the context of the processing of personal data that is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interest pursued by the controller or by a third party, as referred to in Article 6(1), point (f), of that Regulation, as well as in the context of the processing of personal data necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject, necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller, as referred to in Article 6(1), points (c) and (e), respectively, of that Regulation.