Financial service companies are one of the prime targets for cybercriminals with massive amounts of money and sensitive data they have. The highly lucrative scopes for fraud, theft, and extortion make the financial companies allure the highly competent, experienced, and motivated cybercriminals, including organized cybercriminals syndicating that employs the highly sophisticated diverse set of techniques and tools, making cybersecurity for the financial services the key priority.
Reportedly, the average cost of data breaches across the financial sector is reported at $5.9 million between March 2022 and March 2023. It is the key statistic that is hardly ignored. The entire financial service industry can hardly afford to be the least bit complacent regarding cybersecurity and the must-have defense measures like managed third party risk for mitigating cyber threats. We will now take a look at the essence of cybersecurity across the financial services industry.
Cybersecurity Threats to the Financial Sector
Financial services organizations have been the main target for cybercriminals; however, they are more at risk today. The efforts of digital transformation across the financial services industry have upsurged greatly owing to the changes in customer choices and behavior, the rise of remote working, and the disruptions led through the pandemic. Companies are migrating to cloud-based frameworks, the number of endpoints multiplied, and the growth in the attack surfaces. Therefore, the attackers have numerous entry points that they can exploit and gain access to the assets.
Financial institutions and banks have been alluring targets with their massive financial assets and rich data sources. Thereby, it leads to the growing risks of cyber threats across the fintech industry. However, the efforts involved in digital transformations have led companies to generate a lot of data, data used by cybercriminals who sell it on the black market while threatening to destroy it unless the ransom is paid off. Irrespective of the digital transformation initiatives, the financial industry still needs more legacy technology and fragmented IT systems that are never replaced due to their core functionalities or data.
Role of Cybersecurity in Financial Services Companies
Let's now examine a few of the important reasons for the need for cybersecurity in financial service companies.
Continuously Intelligent Threat Monitoring
The attackers would often enter into the financial networks and remain there undetected for months and even years, leading to irreversible damage. To desolate cyber threats across the financial sector comes as the first-mover advantage. It is for this reason that real-time, intelligent threat monitoring is important, like third or fourth party risk monitoring. All the requests, user behavior, network activities, and so on need to be closely and constantly monitored. Modern technologies like cloud computing, self-learning AI, analytics, and automation should be leveraged to infuse agility and accuracy into security. Weeding out the guesswork from security can help you stay well ahead of the attackers.
Implement Effective Vulnerability Management Processes
The unsecured risks will poke holes into the security structure that offers the attackers easy entry points into the systems and infrastructure in the space of intensified cybersecurity threats across the financial sector, where you require strong and effective Vendor Risk management processes. It will help you proactively identify the security weaknesses, risks, and misconfiguration and emphasize them as well as secure them before the attackers locate them. They offer round-the-clock visibility into the security posture that helps you keep strengthening it.
Zero Trust Architecture
Zero Trust is the main principle working behind cybersecurity across the financial sector. It assumes that each user, network, and device is possibly compromised and needs certification and authentication at each step. The Zero Trust Architecture will help in reducing the risk by following the three main principles: never trusting anyone till they are verified and assuming that the breach has taken place or is inevitable while applying for the least privileged access by granting minimum privileges performing the work. The Zero Trust security is constantly monitoring malicious activities, reducing the risk of any unauthorized access and lateral movement happening in the network.
Incident Response and Recovery Plans
A thoroughly defined incident response plan can effectively manage the incidents that involve cybersecurity for the financial services before, during, and post an incident. It would be best if you had a clear roadmap classifying everything about the incident, the one who is responsible for responding, role and responsibilities, reporting requirements, and documentation. You should outline your plan on things you should respond to and recover from the security breaches to reduce the impact on the customers and operations.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
SIEM forms the combination of software and services that get used for SEM or security event management with security information management or SIM. The SIEM solutions would analyze and collect the security event logs across varied systems and applications in real time, allowing you to detect and respond to possible security incidents instantly before they disrupt business operations. Furthermore, it would help if you gained visibility into the network activity to help meet their compliance requirements.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity for financial institutions has been a major area of interest. You should consider how high the stakes are and how disruptive the results would be for the whole firm. It is the reason why it is one of the ideal ways to prepare your firm for the situation involving cyber threats to ensure that it gets supported from the core.
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