70% of UK financial organizations now cite cyberattacks as the top risk to financial stability. This is not surprising, given that financial institutions are 300 times more likely to face cyberattacks than any other sector. This is a difficult environment for banking industry leaders to navigate: banks are increasingly interacting with more and more technology; however, it also increases risk by introducing more entry points for bad actors.
This raises an important question: what are the biggest cybersecurity challenges banks face and how can they protect their systems in an increasingly hostile digital environment?
Vice President of Product Management at NinjaOne.
The full stop era
Every device, from servers to employee laptops and mobile phones, represents a potential entry point for attackers. The rise of remote working and digital consumer banking only perpetuates this challenge. Over the past few years, we have seen two-thirds of banks offer their employees the option to work hybridly, exposing more remote access to their employees. As a result, financial institutions are managing more heterogeneous devices than ever before, significantly expanding their attack surfaces.
Banking on the cloud
Financial institutions are racing to reap the rewards of digital transformation through public cloud infrastructure, with 82% of banking executives planning to move more than half of their mainframe workloads to the cloud. This introduces another potential attack surface, making the financial sector an increasingly attractive target.
Although cloud security follows similar principles to traditional security measures, the main difference is that it operates over the public Internet, leaving no room for error when it comes to security. As a result, existing security solutions may not be enough to protect against the unique risks of the cloud. Security teams must update their plans to meet the specific needs of the cloud environment.
Fortunately, there are many ways banks can reduce their attack surface and improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks, whether the endpoint is remote, in a private data center, or in a public cloud .
Here are six steps banks can take to mitigate security threats:
1. Monitor, identify and correct configuration errors: Misconfigured cloud resources, SaaS applications, or any device exposed to the Internet can cause incidents where data is inadvertently exposed or stolen by a malicious actor. For financial institutions, this type of threat will have both a monetary impact and could harm their brand and the trust of their customers. To mitigate these risks, banks must not only maintain an accurate inventory of their cloud environments, SaaS and enterprise applications, but also ensure complete visibility across all endpoints. Active monitoring and detailed visibility allow banks to identify and correct configuration errors before they result in serious damage.
2. Apply multi-factor authentication: Besides strong passwords, multi-factor authentication offers a huge security boost. The most effective options are hardware security keys or time-based one-time password (TOTP) applications, like Google Authenticator. This ensures that even if a bad actor obtains a username and password, they will not be able to log in without access to a physical key or device.
3. Save data and get insights: Ransomware poses a serious risk to organizations because it brings operations to a screeching halt. To build resilience and ensure access to critical information, even in the event of a successful attack, security and IT teams must not only safeguard cloud and endpoint data, but again, maintain visibility into their environments. By backing up their data and monitoring endpoint activity, banks can better protect themselves and recover more effectively from ransomware attacks.
4. Exercise the principle of least privilege and limit third-party access: Compromised user accounts are one of the leading causes of breaches. Limiting user access to the absolute minimum reduces the impact of a bad actor impersonating a legitimate user. Additionally, overly permissive third-party access can inadvertently expose sensitive information to unintended recipients.
5. Keep patches up to date on all endpoints: Patching is an essential security control. Outdated operating systems and applications can leave the door open to intrusions or exploits. To facilitate this, banks can use patch management tools to automate many updates across all their machines.
6. Use threat detection and response tools: To ensure nothing slips through the cracks, banks should use a threat detection and response tool as part of a thorough cybersecurity plan. It can also monitor and become aware of threats both in the cloud and on endpoints, before they materialize, stopping them in their tracks.
Cyberattackers typically target industries that offer reams of sensitive data and the possibility of lucrative ransom payments, making financial services a prime target. To combat this problem, IT teams at banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions must partner with security teams to reduce their attack surface, harden endpoints, and quickly address known vulnerabilities.
By taking a few smart steps and partnering with the right solution providers, banks can rest easy knowing their data is safe.
We have presented the best professional VPN.
This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro’s Expert Insights channel, where we feature the best and brightest minds in today’s technology industry. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you would like to contribute, find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro