Industries

Finance

Cybersecurity in Financial Services Industry

According to PR NewsWire, the Financial Services Industry is projected to reach $28 trillion in 2025. This is a staggering amount, and this is constantly increasing with more innovative solutions being introduced to the market.

Preventing Financial Services Data Breaches

Financial services are a lucrative target for cybercriminals because of the potential significant monetary gain of a successful attack. Thus, financial services organizations must always maintain robust controls around their critical infrastructure, to protect confidential data as well as to ensure business continuity in the event of an incident.

As companies and individuals become more reliant on digital transactions, the financial systems and data contained on them are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks.

Financial Service Providers Lack Web Security Testing

Many financial service providers have suffered reputational damage due to data breaches. According to Fortunly, 65% of the top 100 US banks failed web security testing in 2017. Hackers are more inclined to target vulnerabilities in web and mobile applications to steal sensitive information or demand a ransom to not publish sensitive information. These risks have the potential to lead to significant regulatory fines, reputational and brand damage, and subsequent financial setbacks for FS businesses.

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Insight

Data Breaches in Financial Services Industry

Notable cybersecurity statistics & data breach trends across the financial services sector, where the average cost of cyber crime costs organizations over $18 million per attack, which is by far the most across all sectors and 42% higher than any other sector.

$18.5M

Average Cost of Cybercrime

According to the Financial Services Industry Cybercrime Report, the average cost of cybercrime for a company was $18.5 million. The figures were higher than any other vertical market and significantly higher than the same numbers across all sectors, which came in at $13 million.

238%

Increase in Attacks

Between February and April 2020, attacks targeting the financial sector increased by 238%, according to VMware Carbon Black threat data.

300x

More Likely to Be Targeted

In a report by the Boston Consulting Group, financial services firms are 300 times more likely to be targeted by a cyberattack than other companies.

94%

Percent of Attacks Delivered by One of Four Delivery Methods

Based on an annual security report by Akamai, 94% of attacks against the financial services sector were delivered by one of four methods: SQL Injection (SQLi), Local File Inclusion (LFI), OGNL Java Injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

56%

More Effective at Detecting Cyber Attacks

Ponemon Institute surveyed 400 security professionals across financial services and found that they are more than 56% effective at detecting, 53% more effective at containing cyberattacks. and 31% better at preventing them.

Financial Services Industry

Financial Services Cybersecurity Challenges

There are two key challenges that financial services firms face when implementing cybersecurity solutions.

Financial Data Security and Privacy

The first is the sheer volume of information that needs to be protected. Financial services firms have to protect a multitude of applications, data and devices. All of this information, which is flowing in real time, has to be monitored and managed efficiently in order to protect companies from data breaches.

Financial Data Security and Privacy The first is the sheer volume of information that needs to be protected. Financial services firms have to protect a multitude of applications, data and devices. All of this information, which is flowing in real time, has to be monitored and managed efficiently in order to protect companies from data breaches.

Information Security Architecture

The second challenge is the growing sophistication of cyberattacks. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for ways to penetrate the security of financial services companies. The solutions that companies have implemented in the past to secure critical information may not be able to detect newer threats. Financial services companies are constantly looking for solutions that can protect them from the latest cyber threats.

Information Security Architecture The second challenge is the growing sophistication of cyberattacks. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for ways to penetrate the security of financial services companies. The solutions that companies have implemented in the past to secure critical information may not be able to detect newer threats. Financial services companies are constantly looking for solutions that can protect them from the latest cyber threats.

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BreachQuest

Security Solutions for Financial Services Providers

It might not be entirely possible to patch all security vulnerabilities in a financial application because hackers keep introducing new and more sophisticated attacks to exploit any secure system. Therefore, BreachQuest reimagined the incident response process with the Priori Platform ™ by focusing on Cyber Attack Preparedness

Emergence of New Technologies in the Financial Sector

The financial services industry is incorporating new technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other digital services. Therefore, companies need to set up an incident recovery plan to ensure protection from all dimensions. It is difficult to build a fully secure infrastructure while companies are constantly testing new technologies to improve their services.

At BreachQuest, we use our Priori Platform to ensure end-to-end incident readiness so that all attacks associated with any new technology can be contained beforehand and subsequently remediated rapidly in the event of a breach occurring.

Emergence of New Technologies in the Financial Sector

Using Multiple Third-party Vendors

Financial services companies often put vendors through various security checks prior to using their services, but effectively overseeing, monitoring and managing third party risk compliance across multiple vendors is a significant challenge.

A single major vulnerability in a third party can potentially cause damage to a financial services provider. Therefore, companies should always be ready and take an active and continuous improvement approach to their incident response plan. Some incident response plans are too slow to act, and they often fail to contain attacks caused by third-party vulnerabilities, but our Priori Platform ensures continuous and instant visibility.

Risks of Insider Threats

Insider threats have the potential to carry out large-scale cyber attacks in any sector or industry. These threat actors may include the most recent or well-trusted employees of the company who need access to sensitive data or records. Most of the organizations protect themselves from outside threats using firewalls and highest security protocols, but they are unable to secure their systems from creating a large vulnerability from the inside.

In order to protect financial service providers from such threats, BreachQuest provides continuous monitoring and incident response services that are further enabled by the Priori Platform. This helps dramatically reduce risk, downtime and the losses from threat actors sitting inside an organization.

Social Engineering Attacks are on Rise

Phishing, Ransomware and spear phishing attacks are common among all financial services organizations. The attackers utilize social engineering techniques to make employees perform a certain action that could lead to system takeover or a data breach.

The most efficient way to prevent such attacks is formal cybersecurity training for employees, and comprehensive filtering systems that route out malicious attachments. Unfortunately, unaware or uneducated employees often trigger malicious links, leading to infiltration and subsequently establishing a platform for threat actors to launch their attacks.

Conclusion

Why BreachQuest?

No security system is powerful enough to detect all types of security threats because hackers are constantly innovating, and often one step ahead of most security programs. Companies operating in the financial services sector must continuously improve and test their ability to prevent, detect, contain and respond to security threats, and before they cause any damage.

BreachQuest also offers Red Teaming services to critically analyze threats for financial service providers. Our Red Teams have experience in analyzing various financial service providers. Our proven “Don’t Buy a Breach” service provides a modular phased process to support your organization in evaluating mergers and acquisitions (M&A) targets.

BreachQuest’s mission is to drive down recovery time and breach cost. Our approach with the Priori Platform promises instant visibility and rapid recovery, therein minimizing breach cost and elevating the preparedness for your financial organization to internal and external threats.

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