Cyber Heists Continue to Grow, Financial Institutions Remain a Key Target

Everyone loves a good heist movie, which is why Hollywood keeps bringing out new ones. The Ocean’s Eleven series, the Italian Job, Die Hard, the Fast, and the Furious series – the list goes on and on. Yet the story is largely the same – a group decides to steal the diamonds, the gold, the money, or what’s in the safe deposit boxes. They face adversity along the way yet eventually pull off the job.

In the modern era, such physically intensive heists are becoming less common. That’s because criminals can now target organizations via cyber-attacks without having to show their faces and easily cover their digital tracks to escape the consequences. While it may seem like cybercrime is only being perpetrated by the technically savvy, this is no longer true. In a study conducted in late 2022, Cybersecurity Ventures found that cybercrime is set to cost the world $8 trillion USD in 2023. For reference, if it were its own country, it’d be the third largest economy after the U.S. and China.

Another recent report from Contrast Security, Cyber Bank Heists, dove deeper into the cybersecurity threats facing the financial services sector. Some of the statistics worth noting included:

  • 60% of financial institutions have been victimized by malware attacks
  • 48% report an increase in wire transfer fraud
  • 50% have detected campaigns to steal non-public market information

With cyber fraud, phishing, ransomware attacks, account takeovers, and business email compromises (BEC) growing steadily in recent years, these numbers are likely to continue to rise.

Furthermore, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that the business systems across banking and financial services are complex. They span on-premise, legacy systems, such as mainframes, to modern, cloud-native applications. Transactions often traverse a complex route from transactional systems to customer portals delivered from the cloud, other online systems, and back again. The range of devices and applications is vast, and this complexity increases the attack surface for financial organizations. Effective management and implementation of robust security controls to protect against damaging attacks can seem like a difficult, never-ending task.

Defending Against Cyber Heists

Identifying, managing, and securing an enterprise doesn’t have to be difficult, though. Financial services enterprises are already under watchful regulatory and compliance eyes, and most are spending significant funds on meeting these requirements. This is why being able to leverage the same tools for compliance, management, and security should be something IT and security teams look into.

Today, many IT and security teams tend to struggle to manage and integrate a hodgepodge of disparate tools as they seek to defend against infiltration attempts. With a unified security and endpoint management (USEM) solution, financial services enterprises can have real-time alerting, immediate device quarantining, patch management, vulnerability scanning, and automated remediation, along with real-time reporting to prove compliance.

With USEM, everything can be managed from one console: IT managers can set automated processes that ensure critical patches are deployed in a timely manner, without having to rely on end users, that attempted breaches are caught before they can do damage, that endpoints stay secure, and much more.

Find out how Syxsense helps financial institutions identify, manage, and secure their endpoints. Schedule a demo today.