Financial Services

As the financial services sector undertake digital transformation and modernization efforts, financial enterprises must now manage broader cybersecurity challenges. On-premise, owned, or managed in-house technologies are no longer the norm. Organizations must protect against growing security threats found in, for example, cloud environments and third-party software.

Financial institutions are treasure troves of sensitive data, critically important to national economies, and this makes them attractive targets for malicious actors. According to one report, cyber attacks against the financial sector increased 238 percent in the period from February to April 2020 alone.

Financial Services Cyber Challenges

Financial services organizations face an increasing volume and intensity of cyber threats. The following factors contribute to the sector’s increased risk:

Nature of the Sector: Financial firms are targeted by cybercriminals 300x more than other companies due to the potential to exploit financial transactions, to hold operational systems for ransom, and steal personally identifiable information of customers for significant monetary gains.

Third-Party Vendors/Supply Chain: Like many other sectors, financial sector organizations rely on third-party vendors, making it challenging for financial institutions to manage cyber risks across their extended attack surface. Threat actors often engage in “island hopping” by infiltrating past a company’s cyber defenses by going after the weak points in a company’s supply chain or partner network, in lieu of launching a direct strike.

Employee Turnover and Insider Threats: The financial sector has one of the highest turnover rates among all industries. This fact, coupled with the increasing number of threat actors seeking current or recent employees willing to sell their credentials, requires continuous monitoring along with robust credential management.

Broad Motivations: Threat actors targeting the financial services sector are varied, and this only presents additional challenges. Not only is ransomware a growing threat, but nation-state or state-affiliated threat actors recognize how impactful taking a financial services company down would be. In having to defend against all lines of potential attack, financial organizations often feel they have to cover many fronts.

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LookingGlass Capabilities

LookingGlass delivers actionable threat intelligence to help customers in the financial sector operationalize insights and avoid the next big cyber incident. Our capabilities include:

Attack surface management: We continuously monitor assets and networks for vulnerabilities and exposures from the outside in, and inside out. Learn more.

Actionable threat intelligence: We provide normalized, contextualized, and correlated threat intel that allows you to operationalize insight and respond to threats faster.

Optimized threat hunting: Our solutions layer threat intelligence on attack surfaces to help optimize threat hunting efforts. With unique “needles” (tips) and our deep historical threat repository, we also leverage AI/ML to identify and anticipate an adversary’s next move. 

Cyber workforce, analyst, and incident response support: Our platform enables teams to collaborate more effectively, share intel, and develop coordinated defense/response plans.

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