Banks, credit unions, and lending firms handle extremely sensitive customer information essential for managing accounts, facilitating transactions, underwriting loans, and more. With exponential increases in sophisticated cyberattacks aimed at the finance industry, shoring up security postures now represents an existential necessity.
Recent incidents saw hackers spend months undetected inside a bank’s systems before initiating a ransomware attack and demanding $5 million. In another breach, carefully crafted phishing emails impersonating a vendor enabled hackers to covertly wire $2 million from a credit union’s funds. These cases prove costly in recovery efforts, legal liabilities, and long-term reputational damage on top of immediate losses.
This article provides an in-depth guide on securing critical banking platforms, emerging technology infrastructure, adapting to expanding regulations, governing endpoint risks, and partnering with specialized security providers.
Table of Contents
Safeguarding Business-Critical Banking Systems
Legacy computing platforms like online/mobile banking, payments clearing, lending origination, and core back-end databases enable most daily functions. Keuring access and configuration vigilance over these systems is priority one. Core controls should address:
- Third-Party Vendor Oversight: Rigorously vet and monitor partners that either store sensitive bank data or integrate with core transaction systems. Scrutinize their system configurations, access rules, incident histories and legal/regulatory compliance. Bind them contractually to current financial industry security standards.
- Aggressive Patching Cadences: Consistently patch and update legacy platforms to address newly discovered exploitable vulnerabilities that hackers leverage as initial access vectors. Skipping patches negligently ignores known threats.
- Frequent Awareness Training: Institute frequent, mandatory cybersecurity education for new hires and ongoing personnel. Run simulated phishing and social engineering campaigns inoculating staff against prevalent threats.
Locking Down Emergent Technology Infrastructure
While securing longstanding systems remains vital, financial firms must also prioritize protections for emergent infrastructure elements including:
- Cloud Environments: Develop least-privilege access rules, data encryption both in transit and at rest, centralized logging with automated analysis, and compliance controls purpose-built for cloud. Limit permission breadth.
- Internet-Connected Endpoints: Enforce device management policies for tablets, IP cameras, smart speakers and similar systems. Mandate complex passwords, scrutinize network traffic via VLAN segmentation, and promptly decommission hardware no longer utilized.
- Business Continuity Systems: Ensure resilient data and systems backups with capacity to fully restore essential services. Regularly test redundancy mechanisms like failover to alternate data centers in different regions.
Maintaining Expanding Regulatory Compliance
Financial sector governance evolves continuously at state, federal, and international levels. New statutes and guidance emerge regularly in response to evolving cyberthreats.
- Actively Monitoring Shifts: Dedicate personnel to continually track morphing compliance requirements that impact security and technology infrastructure programs. Sign up for update services from governing agencies.
- Remediating Technical Debt: Build roadmaps and target budgets for upgrading legacy platforms within mandated timelines. Seek exceptions or extensions if achieving full realignment proves infeasible.
- Leveraging Specialist Guidance: Engage qualified experts for clarity on complex regulation language and technical implications across jurisdictions.
Safeguarding Endpoints and Access Points
With today’s dispersed remote and hybrid workforce, endpoint protections are equally crucial along with rigorous access governance.
- Combating Phishing Lures: Across email, messaging platforms and social media, phishing persists as the foremost malware infection vector. Employ DNS filtering services to automatically block access to known fraudulent sites.
- Hardening POS and ATM Defenses: Centrally patch and encrypt physical payment terminals. Institute surveillance monitoring for unusual transaction spikes indicating potential tampering.
- Managing Mobile Assets: Enforce unified mobile device management and configurations using centralized policy engines. Restrict access without device compliance checks including malware scans and mandatory disk encryption.
Conclusion
Sophistication and volume of cyberattacks against financial services will further intensify. Securing core banking platforms, implemented technology infrastructure, endpoint environments and compliance management requires continuous evolution to counter threat escalation.
While monumental challenges remain, prioritizing fundamental controls that protect sensitive customer data paves the most effective path to risk reduction. Forming partnerships with specialized financial sector security providers also enhances defenses through continuous guidance.
Institutions able to reassess and upgrade security postures frequently can operate safely despite turbulence. But relentless assessment and adaptation remains imperative in the face of threats new and old.
FAQs
What attack types presently pose the biggest financial sector threats?
Highly sophisticated phishing remains the foremost threat, often enabling ransomware attacks that disrupt operations. Nation-state actors also actively probe bank networks capable of triggering systemic economic impacts if compromised.
Where should under-resourced security teams start enhancing protections?
Begin urgently patching, improving identity and access controls and expanding staff training to harden existing critical transaction systems already processing sensitive customer information. Relatively quick wins there substantially reduce risk despite surrounding ecosystem complexity.
How can we continuously gauge and improve security readiness?
Specialized firms offer compromise assessments evaluating controls and uncovering unseen gaps across people, processes and technologies. Remediating identified findings significantly bolsters baseline readiness at marginally incremental cost.
