Stay secure in the finance sector. Explore the latest in financial cyber security news, trends, and best practices to protect valuable assets and data.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Finance covers the institutions, markets, and services that move, store, lend, invest, and insure money. Its distinctive assets include customer identities, account balances, payment instructions, trading positions, claims, and confidential business data. Operations depend on core banking and ledger systems, payment networks, market-data feeds, identity services, and external processors or cloud providers. Integrity and availability are especially important: an unauthorized change to beneficiary or settlement data can cause direct loss, while an outage can interrupt payments or trading and complicate time-sensitive reconciliation.
Security work therefore focuses on online banking and trading interfaces, APIs, privileged access, credentials, and third-party connections. Useful controls include phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication, least privilege, transaction signing or approval separation, encryption, tamper-evident logging, and anomaly monitoring. Privacy protections apply to personal and financial information; PCI DSS is relevant where payment-card data is handled, alongside jurisdiction-specific financial rules. Vulnerability management should prioritize internet-facing and legacy systems, while incident response needs capabilities to contain fraudulent transactions, preserve evidence, reconcile ledgers, and restore trusted service through tested backups or failover.
Financial firms covered under new regulations will be required to establish a clear response and communications plan for customer data breaches.
Cryptocurrency theft and financial fraud are the new M.O. of the 15-year-old malware operation that has hit organizations around the globe.
The company reports that customers based in Chile, Spain, and Uruguay were the primary victims of the breach, alongside some former employees of the global bank.
Scattered Spider is as active as ever, despite authorities claiming that they're close to nailing its members.