Businesses within the finance industry are no strangers to risk. They deal with risk on a daily basis – managing it and mitigating it for their own companies, and on behalf of their clients. But over the past few years, cyber security threats to the financial sector have grown exponentially. In 2020 alone, there was a 238% increase in the number of cyberattacks faced by banks.
The fact is that financial institutions are at greater risk of attack than most other industries. They are being targeted by hackers, phishers and attackers. And yet many businesses in the finance sector have no plan of action for defending themselves against an attack.
Why Is The Financial Sector A Target For Cyber Attacks?
If you think about the nature of the finance industry, it’s easy to see why financial businesses are being targeted for cyberattacks. Whether your business is focused on banking, investments, accounting or insurance, there are three main areas that make you an ‘easy’ target for an attack:
Businesses within the finance industry are no strangers to risk. They deal with risk on a daily basis – managing it and mitigating it for their own companies, and on behalf of their clients. But over the past few years, cyber security threats to the financial sector have grown exponentially. In 2020 alone, there was a 238% increase in the number of cyberattacks faced by banks.
The fact is that financial institutions are at greater risk of attack than most other industries. They are being targeted by hackers, phishers and attackers. And yet many businesses in the finance sector have no plan of action for defending themselves against an attack.
Money in Transit
Personal Information
Smaller Businesses Make For Better Targets
What Are The Types Of Cyber Security Threats To The Finacial Sector?
Looking at why the financial sector is a target for attackers also gives a bit of insight into the types of attacks that financial organisations should be preparing themselves against. But the threats out there are plentiful. There are:
1. Email Security Threats
By its very nature, email is insecure. It is a medium for communication that was never designed to become as large and popular as it has. And this makes it easy for attackers to use the insecurities of the system to their advantage.
For example, it’s all to easy for an attacker to set up an email address that looks a lot like one from your company. All it takes is a spelling error that could easily be overlooked. Even easier, they can set up the email address’ persona to look like it’s coming from someone you know. The address could be an entirely random one – a string of characters at a generic email domain like Hotmail or Gmail. Because it’s rare these days for us to actually look at the address itself, when we’ve got most of the details we need in front of us – the person’s name, title, and even their signature. All of which are easy to fake.
And this is just one facet that attackers take into consideration when planning an email attack. They can take so many forms, after all. These include:
- General phishing emails which target anyone and everyone
- Spear phishing emails which are targeted at specific individuals, incorporating personal information.
- Whale phishing emails which target stakeholders within businesses, particularly those that hold the most access
- Social engineering attacks where attackers take the time to perform background checks across social media platforms, and design their mails to look and sound like you, or one of your colleagues or bosses
- Compromised email addresses where an attacker discovers your password and takes control of the address itself.
Ready to learn more about the variety of different email attack types that are out there? Check out our blog
2. Data Security Threats
In the fast paced, modern world that we live in, data is everything, and finance businesses know this better than anyone. Data helps companies to predict trends, to adjust their service offerings and add value in the right places for their clientele. Businesses in general handle inordinate amounts of data on a daily basis, and financial institutions handle more than most. Which is why data security concerns are paramount for companies in the finance sector. But between regulatory acts like POPIA in South Africa and GDPR in the UK, and the threat of data breaches and attacks, there are plenty of cyber security threats to the financial sector that businesses need to concern themselves with when it comes to their data security. Just some of these include:
- Network security risks which are becoming ever more of a concern as networks need to facilitate employees working from wherever they are in the world.
- Malware attacks where cyber attackers install illicit software on users machines that then tracks their movement, potentially providing them with access to login credentials.
- Ransomware attacks which see attackers who have gained access to data encrypting it, making it inaccessible, and holding it ransom for exorbitant pay-outs.
- Insider threats which come in two varieties – intentional and accidental. While there is the risk that employees will purposefully sabotage, corrupt, and share company data, the risk of employees accidentally altering, losing, deleting or sharing data that is not intended for public eyes is just as big a threat.
Find out how to recognise and avoid internal IT threats in our blog
3. Business Continuity Threats
A further significant cyber security threat to the financial services is that of continuity. You want to ensure that your teams have access to the resources they need to do their jobs, and that your services are available to your clients when they need them. Any downtime poses a threat not only to your operations, but to your reputation as well. Whenever a business falls under attack, whether it’s a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, a Web App attack or their data falling victim to Ransomware, the most critical result is not the loss of income or the financial strain that is placed on the business to rectify the issue. Rather, it’s the loss of trust from the business’ clientele.
Want to learn more DDoS and other Network attacks that businesses like yours face daily? Check out our blog
In an age of Google reviews and instant gratification, trust is a valuable, but fickle commodity. You want to earn trust at every step of the way, since any interruption in service, any announcement that your company has fallen under attack, any suggestion (implicit or otherwise) that a client’s data may be at risk, reduces the trust that is placed in your company. Which in turn can see clients jumping ship and moving to your competitors.
How Can Your Business Defend Itself Against Financial Cyber Threats?
With all of these cyber threats to financial institutions, you may be wondering what steps you can take to protect your company.
And the good news is that you’ve actually taken the first step already by reading this article. Because the biggest asset that your business can have is an exceptional and experienced Managed IT Services partner like Solid Systems.
Because to us, Managed IT Services are about more than simply outstanding IT Support (which is something that we also provide). It’s about more than just implementing technology (though that is also something that we help with). It’s about having a deep understanding of your company, your risks and your needs, and making strategic decisions around risk management, incident response and training.
At Solid Systems, we help businesses in the finance sector with:
Strategic Cyber Risk Management
One of the first steps that we take when partnering with a company is taking a deep dive into the technologies that they have already implemented, and how secure they are, where vulnerabilities may lie, and how they compare to our Solid Certified Standard. From there, we form technology roadmaps that see businesses not only making the most of the solutions they’ve already invested in, but mitigating the risks behind these technologies as well.
Enabling Company-Wide Multi-Factor Authentication
We truly believe that one of the most effective measures against phishing attacks, malware, ransomware and other cyber security threats to the financial sector is enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Why? It simply adds another level of security to your company’s login credentials. Even if an attacker is able to gain access to your employees’ login details, if you have multi-factor authentication enabled for every single user on the account, they still won’t be able to gain access to your data. Not without the user’s cellphone, at least.
And enabling MFA is a relatively simple and cost-efficient process too. So not only is it an effective cyber protection tool, but it’s an affordable and easy-to-use one as well.
Ready to learn more about MFA and how it works? We’ve put together a handy infographic
Creating an Incident Response Plan
Most businesses recognise and respond to attacks far too late. By the time that they have realised that an attack is taking place, the attackers have already gained access to critical data which they can use to their advantage. And once a business does realise that they are under attack, they often don’t have a plan in place for dealing with it. Who is responsible for bringing a business back online, for restoring backups. In fact, who is responsible for ensuring that data is backed up in the first place?
This is another area where partnering with an experienced Managed IT Services provider like Solid Systems can help. We have not only helped our customers time and time again with putting a stop to financial cyber threats, but we know the steps that companies can take to avoid attacks happening in the first place, and helping teams to recognise them when they do occur.
This is all part of the risk mitigation that forms part of our Managed IT services. We make sure that your data is protected and backed up, and that you have a Disaster Recovery plan in place should anything happen to your business, in the form of an external or even internal threat.
Training Your Teams
A company’s first line of defence is its employees. We help businesses in the finance industry to train their teams in email security and how to handle cyber security threats to the financial sector. This helps them to recognise potential attacks, resulting in fewer successful infiltrations and significantly quicker response times to attacks, since teams know exactly who to turn to when a potential problem arises.
Are you ready to experience exceptionally human Managed IT Services? Book a consult today to find out more about how Solid Systems could be securing your finance business against cyber security threats.
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