Key Cybersecurity Threats Confronting Financial Institutions

During my career working with financial organizations, I’ve often heard the mantra, “do more with less.” Organizations are constantly searching for ways to get the most out of every dollar on budgets that are stretched very thin. It’s a great concept but putting that into practice can prove quite difficult. It can also lead to disastrous consequences. 

While assigning small budgets may work in certain departments, it becomes a severe issue when the reigns are tightened for cybersecurity and information technology (IT). Cyberattacks are happening almost daily, and the financial sector is one of the most vulnerable. All it takes is one small blind spot in your network to expose yourself to a loss of valuable data or a total shut down.

Here are just a few of the major risks and threats facing financial organizations today.

Evolving Global Cyber Threats

Deep fakes, ransomware, and new AI-related dangers will become increasingly more sophisticated this year and beyond. An MDR/XDR provider is uniquely qualified to address and keep up with these ever-evolving dangers. Threat intel feeds (global, free, and paid) and honeypots allow them to understand the nature and vector of threats before they even appear on your network. All your data is contextualized to ensure the potential threat is understood or quarantined until it is known.

The rapid nature of XDR/MDR ensures that timeframe is in minutes or seconds versus days or weeks by utilizing the best and fastest software available to hunt down and eliminate threats. They can stay one step ahead of hackers and criminals by ensuring they have the most up to date information and techniques available. That way, they can mitigate vulnerabilities and risk before you even know they exist.

Unreliable Data And Alert Fatigue

An XDR/MDR vendor needs to be able to support organizations of all sizes, from boutique finance houses and billion-dollar enterprises to credit unions, banks, and massive hedge funds. These institutions drive alerts from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands every day. They’re more proactive than responsive, including, but not limited to, threat hunting capabilities. The role of an XDR/MDR vendor is to bring order from chaos by distilling down those thousands of alerts into the most important issues.

Find a vendor that takes the guesswork out of securing your business. A world-class security vendor will analyze all alerts and eliminate the majority of negligible or false positive notifications. They will also assist in other security operations, including meeting compliance, audits and assessments, and incident response. When combining an XDR/MDR vendor’s advanced capabilities with a security operations center (SOC), security issues are resolved faster, oftentimes even before you are notified. In short, no more alert-fatigue.

Regulatory Compliance

The FED, CFPB, OCC, FDIC, FFIEC, SEC, FINRA, Dodd-Frank, BSA/AML, SOX, GLBA, CECL, SEC, NCUA and other agencies want their regulatory way with financial institutions. New mandates are put forward by most governing bodies each year, and these guidelines are rarely, if ever, rolled back. Understanding what is required and how to walk through the difficult mine fields of regulatory compliance is key in choosing the right security vendor. Compliance is not security, and security is not compliance, but security does walk hand-in-hand with compliance.

A solid XDR/MDR provider is able to monitor your entire environment (HQ and branches) for security and compliance issues and changes. They will quickly bring relevant changes to your attention. These vendors work 24/7 to ensure your environment is both secure and compliant; a claim few security vendors can make.

Resource and Budgetary Constraints

The biggest challenge for financial institutions is around budgeting. Ensuring the tradeoffs you make between costs and benefits strikes the right chord. It’s always tough making those decisions. Take charge of your budget by reducing costs and increasing security and compliance capabilities. Utilize an MDR/XDR vendor. Doing more with less is difficult, but not impossible. Finding security personnel at the right price is also challenging. A superior MDR/XDR vendor will help you achieve your security and compliance goals and needs while reducing your overall spend.

Value

Choose a vendor that brings value to financial institutions in a variety of ways by reducing downtime caused by security issues. One that rapidly hunt for, identifies, and mitigates security threats, protecting your team, your organization, and your clients. Prevent malware execution and account credential theft. A strong vendor provides fast, effective, and affordable security, helping you, “do more for less.”

Security Is Well Worth the Investment

As threats like ransomware, malware, misconfigurations (cloud and otherwise), malicious insider threats, and DDoS attacks threaten to impact end-user access, compromise customer data, and effect financial organizations from a regulatory and financial standpoint, security leaders need to stay a full step ahead of cyber criminals. Since managing a 24/7 in-house security team can be difficult and expensive, consider working with a managed detection and response (MDR) or extended detection and response (XDR) provider.

They can deliver the solutions, technology, and personnel you need to keep your organization safer. After crunching the numbers, you may find that investing in an MDR/XDR provider is a lot less than the cost (both financial and to your reputation) of dealing with a major data breach.

For more on how MDR and XDR providers can help protect your financial organization, contact the UncommonX team to request a demo of our XDR platform and talk about your specific security needs.