Financial institutions are a more lucrative target for cybercriminals than any other sector. Cost per breach is escalating. According to Accenture, the financial services industry incurs the highest cost from cybercrime, an average of $18.3 million per company surveyed in 2018. Global breaches in the sector more than tripled over the last decade.
The financial sector also faces a greater variety of cyberattacks than any other sector. Whilst the vast majority of threats target customer data including payment card and bank account information, there are also hugely sophisticated attacks on online financial systems. In the Fintech rush to market, trading apps may not have been adequately tested for security and cybercriminals are fast to exploit security flaws.
Financial institutions are also uniquely vulnerable in that their future business is dependent on their corporate reputation.
Faced with such an onrush of cyberthreats, the financial sector has been a pioneer in systematically deploying Threat Intelligence as a tool for predicting, identifying and disrupting attacks.
But utilising state of the art machine and human generated sources to access the dark web, and trawl the surface and deep web to collate and analyse ‘latest’ data in multiple languages from around the world, is only the first task of effective Threat Intelligence. The best providers of Threat Intelligence supply vital in-time information on possible attacks that are about to be launched or are already in process against similar financial institutions in the same region. They supply reliable real-time and global information on emerging threats, the current most active threat actors in the financial sector, the most utilised malware and malware families, the latest software vulnerabilities and any relevant supplier/vendor exposures to malware. All this real-time intelligence has to be transferred in a form that can be immediately exploited to solve on demand security issues, integrating seamlessly with existing security tools.
A financial organisation that invests in relevant, targeted Threat Intelligence bolsters its resilience to cyberattacks and reacts much faster to reduce the cost and reputational fallout from any ongoing data breach. An immediate reduction in false positive alerts frees up financial services Security Operations analysts to identify significant pending threats quicker and prioritise their expertise where it is most effective. CISOs gain greater whole picture clarity enabling them to make better informed decisions reducing exposure to cyber risk.
