70% of UK financial organizations now cite cyberattacks as a main risk to financial stability. This is no surprise, considering financial institutions are 300 times more likely to confront cyberattacks than any other industry. It’s a difficult landscape for leaders in the banking industry to navigate – banks are increasingly interacting with more technology; however, this also increases risk by introducing more entry points for bad actors.
This raises an important question: What are some of the biggest cybersecurity challenges that banks are facing, and how can they safeguard their systems in an increasingly hostile digital environment?
VP of Product Management at NinjaOne.
The era of the endpoint
Every device, from servers to employee laptops and mobile phones, represents a potential entry point for attackers. The rise of remote work, and digital consumer banking services, only perpetuates this challenge. In the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed two-thirds of banks offer workers the chance for hybrid work, exposing more remote access for their employees. With this, financial institutions are managing more heterogeneous devices than ever before, which dramatically expands their attack surfaces.
Banking on the cloud
Financial institutions are rushing to reap the rewards of digital transformation through public cloud infrastructure, with 82% of banking executives planning to move over half of their mainframe workloads to the cloud. This introduces another potential attack surface, making the financial sector an increasingly attractive target.
While cloud security follows similar principles as traditional security measures, the principal difference is that it operates over the public internet, leaving security no room for error. Therefore, existing security solutions might not be enough to protect against the unique risks of the cloud. Security teams must update their plans to address the specific needs of the cloud environment.
Thankfully, there are many ways banks can reduce their attack surface and improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks regardless of if 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 fix misconfigurations: Misconfigured cloud resources, SaaS applications, or any internet-exposed device can be the root cause of incidents where data is inadvertently exposed or stolen by a threat actor. For financial institutions, this type of threat will have both a monetary impact and can harm their brand and customer trust. To mitigate these risks, banks must not only maintain an accurate inventory of their cloud, SaaS application, and corporate environments but also ensure comprehensive visibility into all endpoints. Active monitoring and detailed visibility allow banks to identify and remediate misconfigurations before they result in serious harm.
Read More: Six ways banks can ensure watertight cybersecurity in a hostile digital
