Financial services organizations are up against a particularly daunting set of cybersecurity challenges. Though it’s true that no industry is immune from the relentless pace of increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, it’s also true that banking institutions, investment firms, payment apps, and others in the financial services realm face a unique set of challenges. The cybersecurity teams within these organizations, in turn, are confronted with immense pressure to stay ahead of and respond to critical threats.
In this blog, we unpack some of the specific challenges FinServ organizations are up against and their implications for cybersecurity, and discuss how FinServ cyber threat intelligence teams can gain an upper hand.
5 Factors Confronting FinServ Firms
1. Inherently High-Value Data
Given the incredibly sensitive personal and financial information they maintain, financial institutions are understandably attractive targets for cyber attacks. Threat actors who successfully acquire this valuable data, through tactics like impersonating a bank’s user login page or deploying a targeted mobile phishing scam, can wreak havoc on multiple fronts, including directly stealing funds, disabling accounts, and deploying ransomware.
The vast quantity of highly-sensitive data that major financial institutions house also gives threat actors the opportunity to act at scale and affect far more than an individual consumer. A threat actor may gain access to an entire branch’s dataset, or access a dataset with accounts for multinational businesses and governments. Should a banking institution’s entire system go down, the implications become an order of magnitude even larger, with the potential to disrupt economic activity. A 2023 ransomware attack that caused outages at 60 credit unions across the United States is just one example of many that illustrate the broad impact a single attack can have within the industry.
2. Attractive Targets = Higher Volume of Attacks
In light of the inherently valuable data they house, FinServ organizations face a higher volume of attacks as compared to other industries. In 2023, FinServ organizations experienced the second highest volume of cyber attacks across all industries, according to reporting from Statista. The number of successful data compromises in the financial services industry in the U.S. alone increased 177% from 2022 to 2023, with 61 million victims affected just last year. This increasing volume of attacks is also observed on a global scale. The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report shows that malicious cyberattacks against financial institutions around the world has increased dramatically over the last 20 years.
The impact of these breaches can be substantial: the IMF further reports that the risk of extreme losses from cyber incidents in finance in increasing, quadrupling to $2.5 billion in losses since 2017. Financial institutions also incur the highest average costs ($3.6M) per breach of any industry, according to Forrester’s Enterprise Breach Benchmarks Report. The pace of these attacks, and their significant material impact when successful, challenges FinServ cybersecurity teams to stay on point from both an offensive and defensive standpoint.
3. Evolving Offerings & Infrastructure
Ongoing shifts in FinServ operations and infrastructure also create challenges for cybersecurity teams. As financial institutions continue to move away from traditional brick-and-mortar operations toward digital apps and services, and adopt new technologies like cloud computing, mobile banking, blockchain, AI, and IoT devices, external attack surfaces can become exponentially more expansive and complex. This means security teams have far more potential points of attacker entry to identify and monitor on an ongoing basis, and the risk of missing an exposure or failing to identify an asset on newly spun-up service can increase.
4. Expansive Third-Party Ecosystems
Changes to offerings and infrastructure have also ushered in the need for more strategic partnerships and tech integrations with third-party partners. These might include providers of cloud lending software or mobile money transfer apps. While necessary for business, these expansive third-party ecosystems can introduce more potential risk to FinServ firms. A vulnerability present on a third-party partner connected to a bank’s network becomes a risk to the bank itself, which is responsible for managing that risk. Major banking institutions can partner with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of third-party partners, and these banks need a way to thoroughly understand and monitor the risk these partners present on an ongoing basis. Attackers are increasingly turning to supply chains to launch attacks at scale, and organizations that don’t conduct due diligence on their partners can face repercussions beyond the initial event, including fines.
5. Robust Industry Regulations
Speaking of fines, the financial services industry is among the most regulated of all industries. FinServ organizations must adhere to a number of additional mandates related to how data is stored and protected (take for example the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), as well as how cybersecurity incidents are investigated and reported. These regulations make the stakes of a potential data breach even higher for FinServ security teams. Financial institutions that support global banking must also ensure that they’re not only following regulations issued by their own government, but that they’re in compliance with regulations issued by other governments, too.
So What’s a FinServ Cybersecurity Team to Do?
FinServ security teams unfortunately can’t change the fact that their data is highly-attractive to cyber criminals, nor can they reasonably address the industry’s continued shift toward digital-first operations and the need for third-party partnerships. Reducing regulatory oversight? That’s not something that’s likely within their power to change, either.
However, one of the key ways these security teams can improve how they defend against breaches is with more accurate, contextualized intelligence about the threat landscape. Many financial firms either rely on a multitude of disparate intelligence sources that make it difficult to synthesize and prioritize threat information, or they lack the intelligence needed to gain full visibility into their attack surface and broader threat landscape. Accessing one source of timely, accurate, contextualized intelligence can better equip teams to address some of their most pressing security objectives, including:
- Customizing Intelligence Feeds: Superior intelligence can reduce false positives and provide essential meta data needed for accurate threat identification and sophisticated operations.
- Enhancing Brand Protection: Access to real-time certificate data can help identify evidence of domain impersonation, phishing attempts, and related infrastructure from nefarious actors.
- Improving Visibility into Third-Party Risk: Accurately, timely data about third-party risk, particularly during zero-days, can provide the total visibility that traditional Third-Party Risk Management systems can lack.
Censys equips FinServ firms with the most trusted internet intelligence dataset available, to help them take a proactive and comprehensive approach to threat hunting and defending attack surfaces. You can learn more about how Censys supports the FinServ industry here, or you can take a deeper dive into some of the specific ways FinServ firms can benefit from Censys intelligence. To discover how a major financial services institution used Censys in practice, head on over to our Swiss Life case study!
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