Cyber Threat Landscape

Expanded attack surface as firms are embracing decentralizing their networks and migrating their IT workloads to the cloud. Bad actors target unsecured servers and vulnerable applications, as well as steal credentials to gain access to public cloud platforms. Once they have access, the attackers can launch new instances and move laterally to initiate attacks on other workloads, ultimately harvesting and exporting data.

Advanced threats that evade detection and operate at will in a network. Attackers engineer the threats, such as the Emotet banking Trojan, to avoid detection by even next-generation security technologies. Attacks are designed to infiltrate a specific financial institution’s network after patient research of the target organization, its security controls, and those of its network of service providers and vendors. The high volume of attacks that financial services security teams face. Their organizations experience thousands of attacks every day targeting employees, critical infrastructure systems and applications.

Limited resources increase the tremendous strain on security teams. Most regional and branch locations lack advanced security controls; those measures that they do have are notorious for not detecting attacks or for generating false positives when they do generate an alert. The result is that any legitimate alerts of malicious behavior are buried under a mountain of data from across the network.

Some Common Types of Cyber Attack on Financial Service Organizations are:

• Spear Phishing Campaigns
• DDoS Attacks - Through to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks where the perpetrators can suspend services sometimes affecting millions of customers at one time
• ZERO-DAY Exploitation - Alternatively, hackers can choose to exploit the organization’s network through software flaws known as Zero-day attacks