Money Mules Require Banks to Switch from Defense to Offense
Financial institutions need to be proactive when identifying and mentally preventing fraudulent activity. Here's what to watch f for .
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.
Financial institutions need to be proactive when identifying and mentally preventing fraudulent activity. Here's what to watch f for .
Telegram-Based Market Is Exploiting Gaps in US Tracking of Departed Visa HoldersA Russian darknet marketplace is exploiting a major blind spot for U.S. financial institutions by trafficking in the identities of former legal immigrants. Telegram-based group Karma Fullz has built a profitable criminal enterprise with highly convincing synthetic identities.
Flare warns devs are unwittingly publishing production-level secrets Docker Hub has quietly become a treasure trove of live cloud keys and credentials, with more than 10,000 public container images exposing sensitive secrets from over 100 companies, including a Fortune 500 firm and a major bank.…
Inotiv Tells SEC 'It's Still Evaluating Full Impact and Notifying Breach Victims'Drug research firm Inotiv in a filing with federal regulators said it is still evaluating the financial and operational impact of an August cyberattack that's linked to ransomware gang Qilin. The company is also notifying nearly 10,000 people whose data was allegedly stolen in the incident.
Google Says Gemini Enterprise Agentic AI Model Is Ready for Banking ClientsBNY is integrating Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise agentic artificial intelligence platform into its proprietary enterprise AI platform, Eliza. The move represents an evolution from AI as a pilot project to AI as infrastructure for the global financial services organization.
A new report by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) shows that ransomware activity peaked in 2023 before falling in 2024, following a series of law enforcement actions targeting the ALPHV/BlackCat and LockBit ransomware gangs. [...]
The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network shared data showing how dramatically ransomware attacks have changed over time.