Businesses in the financial services sector won’t be strangers to being targeted by various forms of financial crimes and fraud. The large amounts of revenue certain financial services businesses generate makes them targets for cyber criminals. According to a November 2020 survey, 62% of financial service providers suffered a breach in the previous 12 months.
Cyber threats are constantly evolving. Here are some things businesses in the financial services sector needs to know about cybersecurity.
Financial Services Cybersecurity
Vulnerability
Banking and financial institutes are 300 times more likely to be at risk of a cyberattack than other companies. These threats incur a substantial financial loss to the financial firms as they have to deal with those attacks and the aftermath effects. According to a report by IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, the financial services sector was the most attacked industry for three years in a row by 2018. It accounted for nearly 20% of the cyberattacks across all verticals in 2018.
Human aspect
Staff are at the heart of businesses. And unfortunately they’re often at the heart of attempts to compromise the organisation. Mistakes made by employees can take a variety of forms – they can fall victim to phishing or more targeted social engineering attacks, or they could misconfigure a system. Training staff to recognise potential cyber threats is vital for not falling victim to cyber crime.
Technical systems
Training your staff to recognise cyber threats is important. But all the training in the world can’t help if your systems aren’t up to it. Much of your cybersecurity efforts should be shouldered by technical solutions implemented throughout your business infrastructure. Although some may question the need to invest hefty sums, it is always better to hope for the best but plan for the worst.
Cybersecurity alerts
A recent survey found that 40% of banks receive around 160,000 irrelevant, incorrect, or duplicate cybersecurity alerts daily. Moreover, the security experts at Mastercard reported that they witness around 460,000 intrusion attempts on an average daily. They revealed that they had tracked 267,322 intrusions within 24 hours.
Emerging technologies
As technology rapidly advances, cyber security teams and adversaries alike are looking at ways of using cutting-edge tools. For example, malicious actors have started using deepfake technology to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. And as the world adopts 5G mobile networks, threat actors will seek to gain new advantages with 5G technology.
While financial organisations remain lucrative targets for most cybercriminals, they can still ramp up their defences enough to mitigate the possibility of falling victim to most threats. If your financial services business is concerned about cyber threats and want to improve your security systems, get in touch with ACUTEC today.
