Financial services institutions are a primary target of cybercriminals, with valuable data and complex infrastructure creating an irresistible target for many intruders. Additionally, this industry suffers from the largest losses due to attacks, with an average cost of $13.5 million. Reputation damage from data breaches is another significant concern for 34 percent of financial services organizations, according to PWC. As a financial institution, your company faces many network security challenges, one of which is maintaining protection against cyber attacks. When 67 percent of financial services companies believe the likelihood of an attack is high, you need a way to manage these threats while maintaining real-time connections and staying in regulatory compliance.
Network Security Challenges for Financial Services Organizations
There are several complex challenges faced by financial services organizations, such as:
- Spear Phishing: Social engineering tactics, such as spear phishing, trick people into thinking messages come from a legitimate source. The hackers get login credentials and other sensitive data needed to gain entry into restricted areas. An offshoot of this strategy, called whaling, tricks the financial department into transferring money by sending spoofed messages from CFO and CEO addresses.
- Sophisticated Attacks: The capabilities of cybercriminals continue to increase as they develop new methods to circumvent network security measures. One of the most devastating attacks on financial institutions came from Carbanak, a cybercriminal group responsible for stealing $1 billion from 100 banks.
- Low-Level Distractions: Your IT resources get strained to the limit when you regularly deal with low-level attacks. These attacks are just big enough that you can’t ignore them, but attackers take advantage of the split attention for larger intrusion attempts.
- Legacy Technology: Financial institutions relying on decades-old systems lack the necessary protection against today’s modern threats. These systems are difficult to maintain, often have unpatched security vulnerabilities and take significant resources to migrate over to modern solutions.
- Poor Preparedness: Many institutions lack enough investment in their network security resources, doing the bare minimum to keep consumer trust.
- Market Changes: You balance new regulations, shifting technical requirements, adaptation to market disruptions and countless other elements in the financial services industry. Today’s consumer wants convenient service across a variety of channels, which increases the attack surfaces in your organization and makes it harder to keep data safe.
With all of these obstacles, network security professionals need to have the right technology in place in order to best mitigate these risks.
Advanced IP Filtering Protection
You need the right network security technology to protect you against increased threat levels. Financial services offer a low-risk, high-reward target.
Advanced IP Filtering provides a necessary layer of network protection for today’s financial services companies. This network security technology looks at attacker IPs and handles these intruders in bulk, rather than going after individual IPs. This reduces traffic volume and logging alerts, freeing up resources to focus on the most relevant intrusions. An Advanced IP Filtering solution gives you granular control over IP filtering so that you provide access to the right people (like customers) while blocking cybercriminals.
Whether you’re struggling with legacy systems or a lack of resources, you need the right tools to protect your organization and its customers. Advanced IP Filtering provides a level of protection that will allow you to intelligently handle the threats targeting your organization.