Stay secure in the finance sector. Explore the latest in financial cyber security news, trends, and best practices to protect valuable assets and data.
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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.
A sophisticated social engineering cybercrime campaign bent on financial gain was observed being run from Tencent servers in Singapore.
Scammers set up call centers in luxury rentals to run bank help-desk fraud, as well as large-scale phishing campaigns, across at least 10 European countries, according to law enforcement.